lled, the "dormitory,"
of my club, I had been reading a volume named "Sur l'Humanite Posthume,"
by M. D'Assier, a French follower of Comte. The mixture of positivism
and ghost-stories highly diverted me. Moved by the sagacity and
pertinence of M. D'Assier's arguments for a limited and fortuitous
immortality, I fell into such an uncontrollable fit of laughter as
caused, I could see, first annoyance and then anxiety in those members of
my club whom my explosion of mirth had awakened. As I still chuckled and
screamed, it appeared to me that the noise I made gradually grew fainter
and more distant, seeming to resound in some vast empty space, even more
funereal and melancholy than the dormitory of my club, the "Tepidarium."
It has happened to most people to laugh themselves awake out of a dream,
and every one who has done so must remember the ghastly, hollow, and
maniacal sound of his own mirth. It rings horribly in a quiet room where
there has been, as the Veddahs of Ceylon say is the case in the world at
large, "nothing to laugh at." Dean Swift once came to himself, after a
dream, laughing thus hideously at the following conceit: "I told Apronia
to be very careful especially about the legs." Well, the explosions of
my laughter crackled in a yet more weird and lunatic fashion about my own
ears as I slowly became aware that I had died of an excessive sense of
the ludicrous, and that the space in which I was so inappropriately
giggling was, indeed, the fore-court of the House of Hades. As I grew
more absolutely convinced of this truth, and began dimly to discern a
strange world visible in a sallow light, like that of the London streets
when a black fog hangs just over the houses, my hysterical chuckling
gradually died away. Amusement at the poor follies of mortals was
succeeded by an awful and anxious curiosity as to the state of
immortality and the life after death. Already it was certain that "the
Manes are somewhat," and that annihilation is the dream of people
sceptical through lack of imagination. The scene around me now resolved
itself into a high grey upland country, bleak and wild, like the waste
pastoral places of Liddesdale. As I stood expectant, I observed a figure
coming towards me at some distance. The figure bore in its hand a gun,
and, as I am short-sighted, I at first conceived that he was the
gamekeeper. "This affair," I tried to say to myself, "is only a dream
after all; I shall wake and forget m