eets of Manoa, the mysterious city in the wilderness. I see myself
there, the wide thoroughfare filled from end to end with people gaily
dressed as if for some high festival, all drawing aside to let the
wretched pilgrim pass, staring at his fever- and famine-wasted figure,
in its strange rags, with its strange burden.

A new Ahasuerus, cursed by inexpiable crime, yet sustained by a great
purpose.

But Ahasuerus prayed ever for death to come to him and ran to meet
it, while I fought against it with all my little strength. Only at
intervals, when the shadows seemed to lift and give me relief, would
I pray to Death to spare me yet a little longer; but when the shadows
darkened again and hope seemed almost quenched in utter gloom, then I
would curse it and defy its power. Through it all I clung to the belief
that my will would conquer, that it would enable me to keep off the
great enemy from my worn and suffering body until the wished goal was
reached; then only would I cease to fight and let death have its way.
There would have been comfort in this belief had it not been for that
fevered imagination which corrupted everything that touched me and gave
it some new hateful character. For soon enough this conviction that the
will would triumph grew to something monstrous, a parent of monstrous
fancies. Worst of all, when I felt no actual pain, but only unutterable
weariness of body and soul, when feet and legs were numb so that I knew
not whether I trod on dry hot rock or in slime, was the fancy that I was
already dead, so far as the body was concerned--had perhaps been dead
for days--that only the unconquerable will survived to compel the dead
flesh to do its work.

Whether it really was will--more potent than the bark of barks and wiser
than the physicians--or merely the vis medicatrix with which nature
helps our weakness even when the will is suspended, that saved me
I cannot say; but it is certain that I gradually recovered health,
physical and mental, and finally reached the coast comparatively well,
although my mind was still in a gloomy, desponding state when I first
walked the streets of Georgetown, in rags, half-starved and penniless.

But even when well, long after the discovery that my flesh was not only
alive, but that it was of an exceedingly tough quality, the idea born
during the darkest period of my pilgrimage, that die I must, persisted
in my mind. I had lived through that which would have killed most
men