death, and its air will not be wholesome for the sleepers until thou art
gone from it!"

They went farther into the great chamber, and I was left alone in the
moonlight with the dead.

I turned to escape.

What a long way I found it back through the dead! At first I was too
angry to be afraid, but as I grew calm, the still shapes grew terrible.
At last, with loud offence to the gracious silence, I ran, I fled
wildly, and, bursting out, flung-to the door behind me. It closed with
an awful silence.

I stood in pitch-darkness. Feeling about me, I found a door, opened it,
and was aware of the dim light of a lamp. I stood in my library, with
the handle of the masked door in my hand.

Had I come to myself out of a vision?--or lost myself by going back to
one? Which was the real--what I now saw, or what I had just ceased to
see? Could both be real, interpenetrating yet unmingling?

I threw myself on a couch, and fell asleep.

In the library was one small window to the east, through which, at this
time of the year, the first rays of the sun shone upon a mirror whence
they were reflected on the masked door: when I woke, there they shone,
and thither they drew my eyes. With the feeling that behind it must lie
the boundless chamber I had left by that door, I sprang to my feet,
and opened it. The light, like an eager hound, shot before me into the
closet, and pounced upon the gilded edges of a large book.

"What idiot," I cried, "has put that book in the shelf the wrong way?"

But the gilded edges, reflecting the light a second time, flung it on
a nest of drawers in a dark corner, and I saw that one of them was half
open.

"More meddling!" I cried, and went to close the drawer.

It contained old papers, and seemed more than full, for it would
not close. Taking the topmost one out, I perceived that it was in my
father's writing and of some length. The words on which first my eyes
fell, at once made me eager to learn what it contained. I carried it
to the library, sat down in one of the western windows, and read what
follows.

CHAPTER VIII. MY FATHER'S MANUSCRIPT

I am filled with awe of what I have to write. The sun is shining golden
above me; the sea lies blue beneath his gaze; the same world sends its
growing things up to the sun, and its flying things into the air which
I have breathed from my infancy; but I know the outspread splendour a
passing show, and that at any moment it may, like the drop-scene of