il I
realized as if with an awakening that they were full of tremendous fish,
pike perhaps, often perch, and hybrids of many colours and streakings.
These fish lay watching, stretched from one bank to the other; their
number, my loneliness, their immensity, my fixity conspired to frighten me
unspeakably.

At other times the river was in flood, and I, as before, compelled by
the secret of the matter to walk along its towpath, in danger of its
torrents; the path itself became unknown, or lay between two huge channels
choking with muddy torrents. Ever expecting the worst, I was suddenly
at an ancient mill, watching

Slow Lethe without coil,
Softly, like a stream of oil

gliding under the footbridge. This was sickly phantasm, the very waters
breathing decay. The scene swiftly changed. Paddington! and you, dear
old friend C., racing with me across the metals to catch a train, and----
Then C. is in his grave again, and I am in a trap outside my old home;
a stranger stands in the road, cuts his throat; I look on, smile, and
shudder, for he races after the trap with his knife; but I outstare his
Malayan eyes, and he gives up the chase. By way of respite, I now walked
at leisure into a bookshop, and my hand fell upon rarities indeed. _The
Church_, by Leigh Hunt--I had never seen that before! "We don't have
much time for dinner," said the bookseller, and I took the hint and
went out.

And there were other familiar scenes in this phase of nightly alienation.
On occasion, though I awoke several times from a haunting, I fell asleep
again to return to it. Half-nonsense as these dreams were, there was a
persistent force about them. Here was the battalion, expecting to be
attacked. Its nerves, and mine, were restive. The attack broke out
farther up the line, and we got off with a reaction almost as unwelcome
as a battle. Or I was in a town behind the line, into which a number of
very small round gas-shells were falling; then, in the cattle-truck for
the front; presently, in the wild scenery of great hills and deep curving
ravines which I seemed to know so well. (The entrenched ridges in the
unnatural light of the flares looked monstrous once.) I was company
commander; we were to be relieved; and, God, what had I done? Begun to
bring my men out before the other crowd had come up! The mound would
be lost, I should be "for it." The company must be halted in the open;
and so we waited for the relief. It never came.

Still th