may suppose a soul in the rough to be
before it has received the ear-marks, the individualizing touches
which make it a person. Strange that the sense of this inability
should be such anguish! but so we are constituted. There are no words
for the mental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless groping
for myself in a boundless void. No other experience of the mind gives
probably anything like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest from
the loss of a mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comes
during such a momentary obscuration of the sense of one's identity. I
trust I may never know what it is again.

I do not know how long this condition had lasted,--it seemed an
interminable time,--when, like a flash, the recollection of everything
came back to me. I remembered who and where I was, and how I had come
here, and that these scenes as of the life of yesterday which had
been passing before my mind concerned a generation long, long ago
mouldered to dust. Leaping from bed, I stood in the middle of the room
clasping my temples with all my might between my hands to keep them
from bursting. Then I fell prone on the couch, and, burying my face in
the pillow, lay with out motion. The reaction which was inevitable,
from the mental elation, the fever of the intellect that had been the
first effect of my tremendous experience, had arrived. The emotional
crisis which had awaited the full realization of my actual position,
and all that it implied, was upon me, and with set teeth and laboring
chest, gripping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay there and
fought for my sanity. In my mind, all had broken loose, habits of
feeling, associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had
dissolved and lost coherence and were seething together in apparently
irretrievable chaos. There were no rallying points, nothing was left
stable. There only remained the will, and was any human will strong
enough to say to such a weltering sea "Peace, be still"? I dared not
think. Every effort to reason upon what had befallen me, and realize
what it implied, set up an intolerable swimming of the brain. The idea
that I was two persons, that my identity was double, began to
fascinate me with its simple solution of my experience.

I knew that I was on the verge of losing my mental balance. If I lay
there thinking, I was doomed. Diversion of some sort I must have, at
least the diversion of physical exertion. I sprang up, a