ssed Jimmie and the
other boy returning with the last load from the cabin. He noted at the
top of the load the mattress on which he had lain for three nights
and the blankets that had warmed him. But he was proved not to be so
helpless as he had thought. Again he knew where a good night's rest
might be had by one using ordinary discretion.

Again that day, the fourth of his double life, he went the mad pace, a
well-fed, carefree youth, sauntering idly from stage to stage, regarding
nonchalantly the joys and griefs, the twistings of human destiny there
variously unfolded. Not only was he this to the casual public notice; to
himself he was this, at least consciously. True, in those nether regions
of the mind so lately discovered and now being so expertly probed by
Science, in the mind's dark basement, so to say, a certain unlovely
fronted dragon of reality would issue from the gloom where it seemed to
have been lurking and force itself upon his notice.

This would be at oddly contented moments when he least feared the
future, when he was most successfully being to himself all that he must
seem to others. At such times when he leisurely walked a world of plenty
and fruition, the dragon would half-emerge from its subconscious lair
to chill him with its head composed entirely of repellent facts. Then a
stout effort would be required to send the thing back where it belonged,
to those lower, decently hidden levels of the mind--life.

And the dragon was cunning. From hour to hour, growing more restive, it
employed devices of craft and subtlety. As when Merton Gill, carefree
to the best of his knowledge, strolling lightly to another point of
interest, graciously receptive to the pleasant life about him, would
suddenly discover that a part of his mind without superintendence had
for some moments been composing a letter, something that ran in effect:

"Mr. Gashwiler, dear sir, I have made certain changes in my plans since
I first came to sunny California and getting quite a little homesick for
good old Simsbury and I thought I would write you about taking back my
old job in the emporium, and now about the money for the ticket back to
Simsbury, the railroad fare is--"

He was truly amazed when he found this sort of thing going on in
that part of his mind he didn't watch. It was scandalous. He would
indignantly snatch the half-finished letter and tear it up each time he
found it unaccountably under way.

It was surely funny th