Werner's Readings and Recitations (Volume 13) - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1894 Excerpt: ... WILFRED DENVER'S DREAM. FROM ' THE SILVER KING,' AS PLAYED BY WILSON BARRETT. Denver. Stay, I fell asleep. Jaikes, you don't know what a murderer's sleep is? It is the waking-time of conscience! It is the whipping-post she ties him to while she lashes and stings and maddens his poor, helpless, guilty soul! Sleep? It is a bed of spikes and horrors! It is a precipice for hhn to roll over, sheer upon the jags and forks of memory! It is a torchlight procession of devils raking out every infernal sewer and cranny of his brain! It is ten thousand mirrors dangling round him to picture and repicture to him nothing but himself! Sleep! Oh, God! there is no hell but sleep! Jaikes. Master Will! My poor Master Will. Denver. That's what my sleep has been these four years past. I fell asleep and I dreamed that we were over in Nevada, and we were seated on a throne, she and I, and all the people came to offer us their homage and loving obedience. And it was in a great hall of justice, and a man was brought before me charged with a crime; and just as I opened my mouth to pronounce sentence upon him, Geoffrey Ware came up out of his grave with his eyes staring, staring, staring, as they stared on me on that night, and as they will stare at me till my dying day; and he said, ' Come down! Come down you whited sepulchre! How dare you sit in that place to judge men?' And he leaped up in his grave-clothes to the throne where I was, and seized me by the throat and dragged me down, and we struggled and fought like wild beasts. We seemed to be fighting for years, and at last 1 mastered him, and held him down and throttled him, and rammed him tight into his grave again, and kept him there and wouldn't let him stir, and then I saw a hand coming out of the sky, a long, bony hand with n...