thing waking is! The time of the ghostly moonshine
passes by, and the great positive sunlight comes. A man who dreams, and
knows that he is dreaming, thinks he knows what waking is; but knows it
so little that he mistakes, one after another, many a vague and dim
change in his dream for an awaking. When the true waking comes at last,
he is filled and overflowed with the power of its reality. So, likewise,
one who, in the darkness, lies waiting for the light about to be struck,
and trying to conceive, with all the force of his imagination, what the
light will be like, is yet, when the reality flames up before him,
seized as by a new and unexpected thing, different from and beyond all
his imagining. He feels as if the darkness were cast to an infinite
distance behind him. So shall it be with us when we wake from this dream
of life into the truer life beyond, and find all our present notions of
being thrown back as into a dim vapoury region of dreamland, where yet
we thought we knew, and whence we looked forward into the present. This
must be what Novalis means when he says: "Our life is not a dream; but
it may become a dream, and perhaps ought to become one."

And so I look back upon the strange history of my past, sometimes asking
myself: "Can it be that all this has really happened to the same _me_,
who am now thinking about it in doubt and wonderment?"

III

THE SUPERSTITIOUS MAN'S STORY

By THOMAS HARDY

"There was something very strange about William's death--very strange
indeed!" sighed a melancholy man in the back of the van. It was the
seedman's father, who had hitherto kept silence.

"And what might that have been?" asked Mr Lackland.

"William, as you may know, was a curious, silent man; you could feel
when he came near 'ee; and if he was in the house or anywhere behind you
without your seeing him, there seemed to be something clammy in the air,
as if a cellar door opened close by your elbow. Well, one Sunday, at a
time that William was in very good health to all appearance, the bell
that was ringing for church went very heavy all of a sudden; the sexton,
who told me o't, said he had not known the bell go so heavy in his hand
for years--it was just as if the gudgeons wanted oiling. That was on the
Sunday, as I say.

"During the week after, it chanced that William's wife was staying up
late one night to finish her ironing, she doing the washing for Mr and
Mrs Hardcome. Her husband had finished his