nt than those bees humming out there in the meadow. And I might
as well have developed into any one of my other selves. What were all
those seeds of possibilities for if they never came to anything? Why,
I might have been a hero--it was in me all the time--I might even have
been a god."

Then for the first time he became aware of his body as of something
outside of himself--something that had been tacked on to him. He
felt all at once that his feet were as heavy as logs--that they were
benumbed, that they had fallen asleep, and were filled with the sharp
pricking of thorns. Yet he had no control over them; he could not move
them, could hardly even think of them as belonging to himself. This
sensation of numbness began slowly to crawl upward like some gigantic
insect. He knew it would reach his knees and then pass on to his waist,
but the knowledge gave him no power to prevent its coming, and when he
tried to will his hand to move, it refused to obey the action of his
brain.

"I'm really out of my head," he thought, and the next instant, "or, it's
all a dream, and I've been only a dream from the beginning."

A century afterwards, he opened his eyes and saw a face bending over
him, which seemed as if it were of gossamer, so vague and shadowy it
looked beside the images of his delirium. An excited and eager humming
was in his ears, but he could not tell whether it was the voices of
human beings or the loud music of the bees in the meadow. From his
waist down he could feel nothing, not even the crawling of the gigantic
insect, but the rest of his body was a single throbbing pain, a pain so
intense that it seemed to drag him back from the gulf of darkness into
which he was drifting.

"Can you hear?" asked a voice from out the hum of sound, speaking in the
clear, high tone one uses to a deaf man.

Another voice, he was not sure whether it was his own or a
stranger's--repeated from a distance, "Can I hear?"

"Did you see who shot you?" said the voice.

And the second voice repeated after it: "Did I see who shot me?"

"Was it Abner Revercomb?" asked the first voice.

He knew then what they meant, and suddenly he began to think lucidly and
rapidly like a person under the mental pressure of strong excitement or
of alcohol. Everything showed distinctly to him, and he saw with this
wonderful distinctness, that it made no difference whether it was Abner
Revercomb or one of his own multitude of selves that had shot him. It