“You will say so indeed when you hear the end, Quatermain.  My bereavement and the sleeplessness which it caused prayed upon me so much, for now that the child was dead my wife was everything to me, that, I will tell you the truth, my brain became affected and like Job I cursed God in my heart and determined to die.  Indeed I should have died by my own hand, had it not been for Savage.  I had procured the laudanum and loaded the pistol with which I proposed to shoot myself immediately after it was swallowed so that there might be no mistake.  One night only a couple of months or so ago, Quatermain, I sat in my study at Ragnall, with the doors locked as I thought, writing a few final letters before I did the deed.  The last of them was just finished about twelve when hearing a noise, I looked up and saw Savage standing before me.  I asked him angrily how he came there (I suppose he must have had another key to one of the other doors) and what he wanted.  Ignoring the first part of the question he replied: 

“’My lord, I have been thinking over our trouble’—­he was with us in Egypt—­’I have been thinking so much that it has got a hold of my sleep.  To-night as you said you did not want me any more and I was tired, I went to bed early and had a dream.  I dreamed that we were once more in the shrubbery, as happened some years ago, and that the little African gent who shot like a book, was showing us the traces of those two black men, just as he did when they tried to steal her ladyship.  Then in my dream I seemed to go back to bed and that beastly snake which we found lying under the parcel in the road seemed to follow me.  When I had got to sleep again, all in the dream, there it was standing on its tail at the end of the bed, hissing till it woke me.  Then it spoke in good English and not in African as might have been expected.

“’"Savage,” it said, “get up and dress yourself and go at once and tell his lordship to travel to Natal and find Mr. Allan Quatermain” (you may remember that was the African gentleman’s name, my lord, which, with so many coming and going in this great house, I had quite forgotten, until I had the dream).  “Find Mr. Allan Quatermain,” that slimy reptile went on, opening and shutting its mouth for all the world like a Christian making a speech, “for he will have something to tell him as to that which has made a hole in his heart that is now filled with the seven devils.  Be quick, Savage, and don’t stop to put on your shirt or your tie”—­I have not, my lord, as you may see.  “He is shut up in the study, but you know how to get into it.  If he will not listen to you let him look round the study and he will see something which will tell him that this is a true dream.”

“’Then the snake vanished, seeming to wriggle down the left bottom bed-post, and I woke up in a cold sweat, my lord, and did what it had told me.’

“Those were his very words, Quatermain, for I wrote them down afterwards while they were fresh in my memory, and you see here they are in my pocket-book.