the dark. Or else she dropped mysterious warnings about the
duty of keeping one's soul and body clean and pure.

It was all very disturbing, and he should have liked to ask questions,
but always some imperious force within himself kept him back. He felt
that his sweet secret would never bear open discussion, but the more
desperately he clung to it, the more his mind was poisoned with doubts
out of which soon grew fears.

Thus began the new dream life.

He was as a rule the only living being in those dreams. Everything else
consisted of lifeless things, and mostly of spaces and dimensions rather
than of objects. The dominant characteristic was an increase of size
proportional to the increase of distance from himself. He found himself,
for instance, in the midst of a vast space laid out in squares. Where he
stood at the centre, those squares were just large enough to hold him.
Then, as his glance passed outward, the squares became larger and
larger, until at last their dimensions became gigantic. Soon they began
to move toward him, growing smaller as they approached, and yet filling
his soul with a horror based entirely on the monstrous size of those
squares that were still miles away. Or he walked down a corridor built
of stones that, as it opened out in front of him, expanded indefinitely
until it assumed proportions that filled him with a sickening sense of
his own smallness. As he moved forward, the corridor automatically
contracted, but always the horror of those immeasurable vastnesses still
ahead of him continued dominant and inevitable. At other times sums of
figures came moving toward him from every direction, and the farther
away from him they were, the more enormous they grew, until his mind no
longer could take them in, and his heart quaked at the thought that
sooner or later one of them would reach him in its original
awe-inspiring immensity.

He tried once to tell his mother about those dreams, but found it
impossible to express what he wished to describe. Not long afterwards he
was aroused in the middle of the night by his mother calling him by
name. Her voice betrayed worry.

"What's the matter, Keith," she asked when at last he woke up
sufficiently to answer her call. "Were you dreaming?"

"I don't know," replied the boy, and at that moment he didn't know.

"I thought first you were crying," explained the mother, "and then I
heard that you were counting something."

"He was probably repeating his