as!--Another leaf! and
another!--Strange, those trees have been dead this hundred years, I
should think. How sharp the wind is too, just as if I were moving along
and meeting it;--why, I _am_ moving! what then, I am not there after all;
where am I then? there are the trees; no, they are freshly-planted oak
saplings, the very ones that those withered last-year's leaves were blown
on me from.

I have been dreaming then, and am on my road to the lake: but what a
young wood! I must have lost my way; I never saw all this before. Well--I
will walk on stoutly.

May the Lord help my senses! I am _riding_!--on a mule; a bell tinkles
somewhere on him; the wind blows something about with a flapping sound:
something? in heaven's name, what? _My_ long black robes.--Why--when I
left my house I was clad in serviceable broadcloth of the nineteenth
century.

I shall go mad--I am mad--I am gone to the devil--I have lost my
identity; who knows in what place, in what age of the world I am living
now? Yet I will be calm; I have seen all these things before, in
pictures surely, or something like them. I am resigned, since it is no
worse than that. I am a priest then, in the dim, far-off thirteenth
century, riding, about midnight I should say, to carry the blessed
Sacrament to some dying man.

Soon I found that I was not alone; a man was riding close to me on a
horse; he was fantastically dressed, more so than usual for that time,
being striped all over in vertical stripes of yellow and green, with
quaint birds like exaggerated storks in different attitudes
counter-changed on the stripes; all this I saw by the lantern he carried,
in the light of which his debauched black eyes quite flashed. On he
went, unsteadily rolling, very drunk, though it was the thirteenth
century, but being plainly used to that, he sat his horse fairly well.

I watched him in my proper nineteenth-century character, with insatiable
curiosity and intense amusement; but as a quiet priest of a long-past
age, with contempt and disgust enough, not unmixed with fear and anxiety.

He roared out snatches of doggrel verse as he went along, drinking songs,
hunting songs, robbing songs, lust songs, in a voice that sounded far and
far above the roaring of the wind, though that was high, and rolled along
the dark road that his lantern cast spikes of light along ever so far,
making the devils grin: and meanwhile I, the priest, glanced from him
wrathfully every now and