y of the audience stirred;
no one but himself had clearly seen what had happened. Vague rows
of 'saints' with gaping countenances stared up at him, while he
shouted, 'Will nobody stop them? as we whisked out through the
doorway. Forth into the moist night we went, and up the lampless
village, where, a few minutes later, the swiftest of the
congregation, with my Father at their head, found us sitting on
the doorstep of the butcher's shop. My captor was now quite
quiet, and made no objection to my quitting her,--'without a
single kiss or a goodbye', as the poet says.

Although I had scarcely felt frightened at the time, doubtless my
nerves were shaken by this escapade, and it may have had
something to do with the recurrence of the distressing visions
from which I had suffered as a very little child. These came
back, with a force and expansion due to my increased maturity. I
had hardly laid my head down on the pillow, than, as it seemed to
me, I was taking part in a mad gallop through space. Some force,
which had tight hold of me, so that I felt myself an atom in its
grasp, was hurrying me on over an endless slender bridge, under
which on either side a loud torrent rushed at a vertiginous depth
below. At first our helpless flight,--for I was bound hand and
foot like Mazeppa,--proceeded in a straight line, but presently
it began to curve, and we raced and roared along, in what
gradually became a monstrous vortex, reverberant with noises,
loud with light, while, as we proceeded, enormous concentric
circles engulfed us, and wheeled above and about us. It seemed as
if we,--I, that is, and the undefined force which carried me,--
were pushing feverishly on towards a goal which our whole
concentrated energies were bent on reaching, but which a frenzied
despair in my heart told me we never could reach, yet the
attainment of which alone could save us from destruction. Far
away, in the pulsation of the great luminous whorls, I could just
see that goal, a ruby-coloured point waxing and waning, and it
bore, or to be exact it consisted of the letters of the word
CARMINE.

This agitating vision recurred night after night, and filled me
with inexpressible distress. The details of it altered very
little, and I knew what I had to expect when I crept into bed. I
knew that for a few minutes I should be battling with the chill
of the linen sheets, and trying to keep awake, but that then,
without a pause, I should slip into that terrible