ne with the night and silence.

So I drifted for three days, eating and drinking sparingly, and meditating
upon all that had happened to me,--not desiring very greatly then to see
men again. One unclean rag was about me, my hair a black tangle:
no doubt my discoverers thought me a madman.

It is strange, but I felt no desire to return to mankind.
I was only glad to be quit of the foulness of the Beast People.
And on the third day I was picked up by a brig from Apia to San Francisco.
Neither the captain nor the mate would believe my story, judging that
solitude and danger had made me mad; and fearing their opinion might
be that of others, I refrained from telling my adventure further,
and professed to recall nothing that had happened to me between
the loss of the "Lady Vain" and the time when I was picked up again,--the
space of a year.

I had to act with the utmost circumspection to save myself from the
suspicion of insanity. My memory of the Law, of the two dead sailors,
of the ambuscades of the darkness, of the body in the canebrake,
haunted me; and, unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came,
instead of that confidence and sympathy I had expected, a strange
enhancement of the uncertainty and dread I had experienced
during my stay upon the island. No one would believe me;
I was almost as queer to men as I had been to the Beast People.
I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions.
They say that terror is a disease, and anyhow I can witness that for
several years now a restless fear has dwelt in my mind,--such a restless
fear as a half-tamed lion cub may feel.

My trouble took the strangest form. I could not persuade myself
that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People,
animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they
would presently begin to revert,--to show first this bestial mark
and then that. But I have confided my case to a strangely able
man,--a man who had known Moreau, and seemed half to credit my story;
a mental specialist,--and he has helped me mightily, though I do not
expect that the terror of that island will ever altogether leave me.
At most times it lies far in the back of my mind, a mere distant cloud,
a memory, and a faint distrust; but there are times when the little
cloud spreads until it obscures the whole sky. Then I look about me
at my fellow-men; and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright;
others dull or