ure will have it, the longing for this forbidden lore grew on me,
till the hunger of Eve in the Garden was mine.

Constantly brooding over a desire that I felt to be vain, tantalized
by the possession of a clue which only mocked me, my physical condition
became at length affected. My health was disturbed and my rest at
night was broken. A habit of walking in my sleep, from which I had
not suffered since childhood, recurred, and caused me frequent
inconvenience. Such had been, in general, my condition for some time,
when I awoke one morning with the strangely weary sensation by which
my body usually betrayed the secret of the impositions put upon it in
sleep, of which otherwise I should often have suspected nothing. In
going into the study connected with my chamber, I found a number of
freshly written sheets on the desk. Astonished that any one should
have been in my rooms while I slept, I was astounded, on looking more
closely, to observe that the handwriting was my own. How much more than
astounded I was on reading the matter that had been set down, the reader
may judge if he shall peruse it. For these written sheets apparently
contained the longed-for but despaired-of record of those hours when
I was absent from the body. They were the lost chapter of my life; or
rather, not lost at all, for it had been no part of my waking life, but
a stolen chapter,--stolen from that sleep-memory on whose mysterious
tablets may well be inscribed tales as much more marvelous than this as
this is stranger than most stories.

It will be remembered that my last recollection before awaking in my
bed, on the morning after the swoon, was of contemplating the coast of
Kepler Land with an unusual concentration of attention. As well as I
can judge,--and that is no better than any one else,--it is with the
moment that my bodily powers succumbed and I became unconscious that the
narrative which I found on my desk begins.

Even had I not come as straight and swift as the beam of light that made
my path, a glance about would have told me to what part of the universe
I had fared. No earthly landscape could have been more familiar. I stood
on the high coast of Kepler Land where it trends southward. A brisk
westerly wind was blowing and the waves of the ocean of De La Bue were
thundering at my feet, while the broad blue waters of Christie Bay
stretched away to the southwest. Against the northern horizon, rising
out of the ocean like a summer thund