resorted to exercise. But even while
skating on the lake, which he himself had swept clean of snow, dreams, he
found, gradually threw their veil over him, and he associated with men
and things that were not of the lake or of its snowy, solitary banks.

Many Indian legends are connected with the lake and the little stream,
the Luinnipiac, which empties into it. One day Frederick skated miles up
the stream to follow it to its source. On the way he was accompanied
by a hovering shadow, the corporeality of which he never for a moment
doubted. It resembled the stoker Zickelmann who had died on the _Roland_,
not the Zickelmann that he had seen lying stretched out a corpse in the
stoke-hole, but the Zickelmann he had seen in his dream.

The shade of the stoker told him that five engine-men, thirty-six
stokers, and thirty-eight coal-passers had sunk with the _Roland_, a
number far greater than Frederick had thought.

"The harbour where you landed in your dreams," he told Frederick, "was
the Atlantis, a submerged continent. The Azores, the Madeira Islands, and
the Canary Islands are the remnants of that continent."

When Frederick found himself leaning over a hole such as foxes make,
seriously hunting for a way to the Toilers of the Light, he came to his
senses and laughed at himself.

From day to day, aye, from hour to hour, the creations of his disordered
brain assumed more and more fantastic forms. Rasmussen was always sitting
on his bed, the four passengers of the _Roland_ were always playing skat
in the lower room, and the sick man went about his house conversing in
whispers with all sorts of invisible men and things, unconscious for
hours at a time of where he was. Sometimes he thought he was in the house
in which he lived when a practising physician, at other times, in the
home of his parents. As a rule, he was on the deck, or in the saloons of
the _Roland_, crossing the ocean to America.

"Why," he said to himself, shaking his head, "after all, the _Roland_ did
not sink."

After midnight he would get up from bed and take the wrapping from
a mirror hanging on the wall, which he had covered up because he was
not fond of mirrors. He would hold the candle close to the glass and
frighten himself by making grimaces, which distorted his features
beyond recognition. Then he would talk to himself, asking questions and
listening to answers, and hearing questions and giving answers. Some of
this was utterly irrational, some