I think I must at length have become light-headed, for gradually a feeling stole over me that everything--my surroundings, my situation, and my suffering--was unreal; that I was the victim of a peculiarly ghastly and horrible nightmare; and that I should by and by be wakened fortunately to find that I was in my own bunk, and that the events of the past twenty-four hours had been nothing more than an exceptionally vivid and realistic dream.
