the restaurant back in the city. His
sleeves now were of well-worn camel's hair. He didn't dare pull the
rear-view mirror around so he could see his face. He said again,
fiercely, "Snap out of it! For God's sake wake up before you hit
something!"

He didn't hit anything. Road, signs, car, clothing, all stayed the same.
Fields abridged by wooded low hills fell away on either side of the
road. The snow had been heavier away from the city and covered tillage,
trees and stone walls alike with a tracked and sullen late-winter
dark-white blanket.

He came to a hill and the obsolete engine knocked and panted. Once over
the top of the hill, he thought with a sudden encouraging flash, he
could prove that whatever was happening to him was illusion. At its foot
on the other side had lain the Brigham Farm, a two-century-old house and
barn converted into a restaurant by a pair of energetic spinsters. A
restaurant where Coulter and his parents had habitually dined out on
Thursday, the servants' night off.

He had heard a long while ago that the Brigham Farm had been struck by
lightning and burned during August of 1939. If it were still there ...

He breasted the hill and there it was, ancient timbers painted a neat
dark red with white door and window-frames and shutters. He held his
eyes carefully away from it after the one look, held them on the road,
which was now paved with a hard-packed layer of snow.

He passed an ear-flapped and baa-baa-coated farmer who sat atop a pung
drawn by a patient percheron whose nostrils emitted twin plumes of
steam. A pung! How many times had he and the other boys of Lincolnville
ridden the runners of such utility sleighs on hitch-hiked rides through
the by-ways of the lovely surrounding countryside!

Coulter maneuvered in his seat to take a quick look at this relic from
the past--and caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror above the
windshield. He said just one word--"_Jesus!_" Nor was he blasphemous in
saying it.

He thought of Jurgen, of Faust--for in some miraculous way he had
reclaimed his youth or been reclaimed by it. The face that looked back
at him was fresh-skinned, unlined, unweathered by life. He saw with
surprise, from the detachment of almost two decades, that he had been
better looking than he remembered.

He looked down, saw that his body, beneath the camel's hair coat, was
thin. The fat and fatigue of too many years of rich eating and drinking,
of sedentary work, of immen