It so happened that the aforesaid Monsieur Listado had given up his bed to me, and slept himself on a small pallet beside the wall in the same room. At the right hand of the head of my bed, a lofty door opened into an adjoining room, a large dreary unfurnished apartment, with several packages of goods scattered about on the floor. On examination, I found there was no window in it, nor any light admitted except through the door into our room, which was the only opening into it. It was a regular _cul de sac_.
We must have been some hours asleep when I awoke, or thought I did, pretty much the same thing so far as my feelings at the moment went, lying on my back, with my hands crossed on my breast, like the statue of a knight templar. These said paws of mine seemed by the way to be of an inconceivable weight, as if they had actually been petrified, and to press so heavily on my chest as to impede my breathing. Suddenly one of my little fingers grew, like Jonah's gourd, to a devil of a size; and next moment the thumb of the other hand, as if determined not to be outdone by the minikin on the left, became a facsimile of a Bologna sausage; so there I lay like a large lobster, with two tremendous claws. My nose then took its turn, and straightway was converted into one of Mr M----'s cotton bags, that lay in the store below, containing three hundred-weight, more or less.
"Oh!" said I now to myself, "what a fool I have been! Nightmare--nightmare."
"Hookey, but it isn't though," said Listado.
"Hillo," said I to myself again--for I was quite certain I had not spoken--"how the deuce can Listado answer my _thoughts_, which I have never uttered?"--And I tried to ask him, but my nose, or the cotton bag, would not let me speak. "Why, it must be nightmare," again thought I to myself.
"The devil a nightmare is it," again said Listado.
And I now began to take fright in earnest; when, on the opposite wall, for I could only see in the direction of the foot of my bed, a gradually increasing gleam of pale glow-worm-coloured light fell; streaming apparently through the door that opened at my shoulder into the large lumber-room already described.
The light seemed to proceed from the further end of this apartment, because the shadow of one of the boxes of goods that lay scattered about the floor was cast strongly against the wall of my room at the foot of the bed.