ame up
from under Tristan's feet, from the point of view of his perceptions;
he told us that one of the strangest of all his experiences was to see
the waste water swirl about in the pan _over_ his head, and being
sucked up the drain as though drawn by some mysterious magnet.

My brother and I shared a flat alone, so there was no servant problem
to deal with. But he was going to need care as well as companionship,
and I had to earn my living. For Alice, it was a case where the voice
of the heart chimed with that of necessity; and I was best man at
perhaps the weirdest marriage ceremony which ever took place on this
earth. Held down in bed with the roped sheet, all betraying signs
carefully concealed, Tristan was married to Alice by an unsuspecting
dominie who took it all for one of those ordinary, though romantic
sick-bed affairs.

From the first, Tristan felt better and more secure in his special
quarters, and was now able to move about quite freely within his
limits; though such were his mental reactions that for his comfort we
had to refinish the floor to look like a plaster ceiling, to eliminate
as far as possible the upside-down suggestions left in the room, and
to keep the windows closely shaded. I soon found that the sight of me,
or any one else, walking upside down--to him--was very painful; only
in the case of Alice did other considerations remove the
unpleasantness.

Little by little the accumulation of experience brought to my mind the
full and vivid horror of what the poor lad had suffered and was
suffering. Why, when he had looked out of that window into the sky, he
was looking _down_ into a bottomless abyss, from which he was
sustained only by the frail plaster and planking under his feet! The
whole earth, with its trees and buildings, was suspended over his
head, seemingly about to fall at any moment with him into the depths;
the sun at noon glared _upward_ from the depths of an inferno,
lighting from _below_ the somber earth suspended overhead! Thus the
warm comfort of the sun, which has cheered the heart of man from time
immemorial, now took on an unearthly, unnatural semblance. I learned
that he could never quite shake off the feeling that the houses were
anchored into the earth, suspended only by the embedment of their
foundations in the soil; that trees were suspended from their roots,
which groaned with the strain; that soil was held to the bedrock only
by its cohesion. He even dreaded lest, dur