"'I feel ever so much better,' Charley said. 'We have got that
opium out of our heads now. How do you account for it all, Harley?'
"'I account for it in this way, Charley. The opium naturally had
the effect of making us both dream, and as we took similar doses
of the same mixture, under similar circumstances, it is scarcely
extraordinary that it should have effected the same portion of the
brain, and caused a certain similarity in our dreams. In all nightmares
something terrible happens, or is on the point of happening; and so
it was here. Not unnaturally in both our cases our thoughts turned
to soldiers. If you remember, there was a talk at mess some little
time since as to what would happen in the extremely unlikely event
of the Sepoys mutinying in a body. I have no doubt that was the
foundation of both our dreams. It is all natural enough when we
come to think it over calmly. I think, by the way, we had better
agree to say nothing at all about it in the regiment.'
"' I should think not,' Charley said. 'We should never hear the
end of it; they would chaff us out of our lives.'
"We kept our secret, and came at last to laugh over it heartily
when we were together. Then the subject dropped, and by the end of
a year had as much escaped our minds as any other dream would have
done.
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