e.

"Lion!" I cried, "_you_ know me, don't you? Bless you, Lion!"

Now, at the dumb thing's recognition, I could have wept for pleasure.
The dog, when I spoke to him, followed me; and for some time walked up
and down and athwart the street, beside me. This was a comfort to me.
At last his master came out upon the sidewalk and looked for him.
Brake whistled merrily, and the dog, at the first call, went bounding
in.

Ordinary writers upon usual topics, addressing readers of their own
condition, have their share of difficulties; at best one conquers the
art of expression as a General conquers an enemy. But the obstacles
which present themselves to the recorder of this narrative are such as
will be seen at once to have peculiar force. Almost at the outset they
dishearten me. How shall I tell the story unless I be understood? And
how should I be understood if I told the story? Were it for me, a man
miserable and erring, gone to his doom as untrained for its
consequences, or for the use of them, as a drayman for the use of
hypnotism in surgery,--were it for me to play the interpreter between
life and death? Were it for me to expect to be successful in that
solemn effort which is as old as time, and as hopeless as the eyes of
mourners?

What shall I say? It is willed that I shall speak. The angel said
unto me: Write. How shall I obey, who am the most unworthy of any soul
upon whom has been laid the burden of the higher utterance? Sacred be
the task. Would that its sacredness could sanctify the unfitness of
him who here fulfils it.

The experience which I have already narrated was followed by an
indefinite period of great misery. How long I remained a prisoner in
that unwelcome spot I cannot accurately tell.

What are called by dwellers in the body days and nights, and dawns and
darks, succeeded each other, little remarked by my wretchedness, or by
the sense of remoteness from these things which now began to grow upon
me. The life of what we call a spirit had begun for me in the form of
a moral dislocation. The wrench, the agony, the process of setting the
nature under its new conditions, took place in due order, but with
bitter laggardness. The accident of death did not heal in my soul by
what surgeons call "the first intention." I retained for a long time
the consciousness of being an injured creature.

As I paced and repaced the narrow street where the money-makers and
money-lovers of the town