nt.

So much so that I did not for one moment suppose that it was really
George Eliot, or that she would countenance that particular sort of
buffoonery, and the incident made no impression upon me at all. I had
already taken my hands off the table, when someone--Mr Kitchener, I
think--banged it down four times, and then triumphantly observed: "_Yes,
of course, you will see somebody during the night, or rather at four
o'clock in the morning, you see!_" The whole thing was the kind of
fiasco I had expected, "degenerating into a romp," as poor Corney Grain
used to remark about the "Lancers" and the stern old lady in the
suburban villa.

The bathos of table turning had surely been reached when it came to
banging the leg of the table down four times, and calmly announcing four
o'clock as the time for my first vision!

But the remarkable point is that I _did_ have my first vision that
night, though it had come and gone long before four A.M.

It is necessary to remember that the sun rises about three-thirty A.M.
during the end of December or first week in January out there, so it
would have been fairly light before four A.M.; whereas when I woke out
of my first sleep that night, it was pitch dark.

My room was the usual whitewashed apartment to be found in the ordinary
colonial "station," with a wooden bed standing about two or three feet
from the wall, and parallel with the only window in the room; which
faced the door (at the foot of my bed), and was fitted with a very dark
green blind, on account of the hot summer sunshine.

But it was now pitch dark in the room. I woke facing the window, but
turned on my side, as one generally does on such occasions, and this
brought me face to face with the wall. To my infinite amazement there
stood between the wall and my bed, a diaphanous figure of a woman, quite
life size or rather more, with one arm held out in a protecting fashion
towards me, and some drapery about the head. The features were,
moreover, quite distinct, and, as I afterwards realised, the counterpart
of George Eliot's curious and Savonarola-like countenance. But at the
moment, oddly enough, I only thought of two things--first, how
extraordinary that what had appeared to me such a silly waste of time
overnight should have had any element of reality about it! Then swiftly
came the second idea: "And how in the world does it happen that I don't
feel a bit frightened?"

I lay there absolutely content and peaceful, w