came, till on waking at times he could
hardly realise that he had not been actually in the flesh to visit the
fatal spot. He sometimes thought that he might have been walking in
his sleep.

One night his dream was so vivid that when he awoke he could not
believe that it had only been a dream. He shut his eyes again and
again, but each time the vision, if it was a vision, or the reality,
if it was a reality, would rise before him. The moon was shining full
and yellow over the quicksand as he approached it; he could see the
expanse of light shaken and disturbed and full of black shadows as the
liquid sand quivered and trembled and wrinkled and eddied as was its
wont between its pauses of marble calm. As he drew close to it another
figure came towards it from the opposite side with equal footsteps. He
saw that it was his own figure, his very self, and in silent terror,
compelled by what force he knew not, he advanced--charmed as the bird
is by the snake, mesmerised or hypnotised--to meet this other self. As
he felt the yielding sand closing over him he awoke in the agony of
death, trembling with fear, and, strange to say, with the silly man's
prophecy seeming to sound in his ears: '"Vanity of vanities! All is
vanity!" See thyself and repent ere the quicksand swallow thee!'

So convinced was he that this was no dream that he arose, early as it
was, and dressing himself without disturbing his wife took his way to
the shore. His heart fell when he came across a series of footsteps on
the sands, which he at once recognised as his own. There was the same
wide heel, the same square toe; he had no doubt now that he had
actually been there, and half horrified, and half in a state of dreamy
stupor, he followed the footsteps, and found them lost in the edge of
the yielding quicksand. This gave him a terrible shock, for there were
no return steps marked on the sand, and he felt that there was some
dread mystery which he could not penetrate, and the penetration of
which would, he feared, undo him.

In this state of affairs he took two wrong courses. Firstly he kept
his trouble to himself, and, as none of his family had any clue to it,
every innocent word or expression which they used supplied fuel to the
consuming fire of his imagination. Secondly he began to read books
professing to bear upon the mysteries of dreaming and of mental
phenomena generally, with the result that every wild imagination of
every crank or half-crazy philos