We may mention another person, who, in a fever, sees a floor giving way every moment. Another, who fancies himself a globe, floating in space; a third, who takes the space between his bed and the floor for a precipice--while a fourth is always dragged to the left. Every reader may find observations and phenomena from his own experience; but this will not advance the question, nor will it explain better than we can, how every person during his life, or, at least, during a long series of years, has at night a dream which is his, and not another's, and undergoes at every attack of fever a certain hallucination, which always presents the same character and the same kind of anguish. This question is a physiological one, and I think the medical men will find some instruction--I do not say about the actual disease which reveals itself by other and more evident symptoms, but of some latent malady, originating in the weak point of the patient's organization, and which it is dangerous to provoke by certain reactives.
This question is not original with the author, who begs his reader's pardon for having introduced it.
Of our heroine, we must say that the hallucination caused by fever presented a musical character, and affected the auditory nerves. She resumed then the reverie she had when awake, or at least half awake, on her first night in the prison. She fancied that she heard the plaintive tone and the eloquent _phrases_ of Albert's violin--now strong and distinct, now weak, as if they came from the distance of the horizon. There was in these imaginary sounds something painfully strange. When the vibration seemed to approach, Consuelo felt a feeling of terror. When it was fully displayed, it was with a power which completely overwhelmed. Then the sound became feeble, and she felt some consolation, for the fatigue of listening with constant attention to a song which became lost in space, made her soon feel feeble, during which she could hear nothing. The constant return of the harmonious tremor filled her with fear, trembling, and terror, as if the sweep of some fantastic bow had embraced all air, and unchained the storm around.
Consuelo soon recovered, and was able again to sing at night, and sleep calmly as before.