Sunday Night - Sleep, Sin, and Old Age - The Dream - Lanikin Figure - A Literary Purchase.
THE Sunday morning was a gloomy one. I attended service at church with my family. The service was in English, and the younger Mr E-preached. The text I have forgotten, but I remember perfectly well that the sermon was scriptural and elegant. When we came out the rain was falling in torrents. Neither I nor my family went to church in the afternoon. I however attended the evening service which is always in Welsh. The elder Mr E- preached. Text, 2 Cor.
x. 5. The sermon was an admirable one, admonitory, pathetic and highly eloquent; I went home very much edified, and edified my wife and Henrietta, by repeating to them in English the greater part of the discourse which I had been listening to in Welsh. After supper, in which I did not join, for I never take supper, provided I have taken dinner, they went to bed whilst I remained seated before the fire, with my back near the table and my eyes fixed upon the embers which were rapidly expiring, and in this posture sleep surprised me. Amongst the proverbial sayings of the Welsh, which are chiefly preserved in the shape of triads, is the following one:
"Three things come unawares upon a man, sleep, sin, and old age."This saying holds sometimes good with respect to sleep and old age, but never with respect to sin. Sin does not come unawares upon a man: God is just, and would never punish a man, as He always does, for being overcome by sin if sin were able to take him unawares;and neither sleep nor old age always come unawares upon a man.
People frequently feel themselves going to sleep and feel old age stealing upon them; though there can be no doubt that sleep and old age sometimes come unawares - old age came unawares upon me; it was only the other day that I was aware that I was old, though I had long been old, and sleep came unawares upon me in that chair in which I had sat down without the slightest thought of sleeping.
And there as I sat I had a dream - what did I dream about? the sermon, musing upon which I had been overcome by sleep? not a bit!
I dreamt about a widely-different matter. Methought I was in Llangollen fair in the place where the pigs were sold, in the midst of Welsh drovers, immense hogs and immense men whom I took to be the gents of Wolverhampton. What huge fellows they were! almost as huge as the hogs for which they higgled; the generality of them dressed in brown sporting coats, drab breeches, yellow-topped boots, splashed all over with mud, and with low-crowned broad-brimmed hats. One enormous fellow particularly caught my notice.
I guessed he must have weighed eleven score, he had a half-ruddy, half-tallowy face, brown hair, and rather thin whiskers. He was higgling with the proprietor of an immense hog, and as he higgled he wheezed as if he had a difficulty of respiration, and frequently wiped off, with a dirty-white pocket-handkerchief, drops of perspiration which stood upon his face. At last methought he bought the hog for nine pounds, and had no sooner concluded his bargain than turning round to me, who was standing close by staring at him, he slapped me on the shoulder with a hand of immense weight, crying with a half-piping, half-wheezing voice, "Coom, neighbour, coom, I and thou have often dealt; gi' me noo a poond for my bargain, and it shall be all thy own." I felt in a great rage at his unceremonious behaviour, and, owing to the flutter of my spirits, whilst I was thinking whether or not I should try and knock him down, I awoke and found the fire nearly out and the ecclesiastical cat seated on my shoulders. The creature had not been turned out, as it ought to have been, before my wife and daughter retired, and feeling cold had got upon the table and thence had sprung upon my back for the sake of the warmth which it knew was to be found there; and no doubt the springing on my shoulders by the ecclesiastical cat was what I took in my dream to be the slap on my shoulders by the Wolverhampton gent.