Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/219

 shipping papers relative to the two vessels they were preparing to send out; and requested her, as her health was constitutionally delicate, and her nervous system had been heavily overtaxed of late, not to sit up for him, but to retire at her usual hour; adding, moreover, that as it was wholly impossible for him to say at what hour he might come home, he did not wish any one to be kept up for him, but he would take the key of the side door with him and let himself in, whenever he could get through the business he had on hand.

That night Mrs. Browne was oppressed by a strangely vivid and most uneasy dream. She seemed to be walking by night through a deep and most impenetrable forest, trying to pick her uncertain way through the thick, rank undergrowth which grew up breast-high around and before her; the choking vines and interlaced bushes intercepting and baffling her, clinging ever tenaciously around her feet, and resisting the frantic efforts of her utmost strength to tear them away, while a strangely sweet, but heavy, pungent odor from the branches she bruised seemed