hought to melt an iceberg with its glow,
only to find at last the overmastering chill seizing my own vitals. It
was not enmity that I felt toward them as they thronged me, but pity
only, for them and for the world.

Although despairing, I could not give over. Still I strove with them.
Tears poured from my eyes. In my vehemence I became inarticulate. I
panted, I sobbed, I groaned, and immediately afterward found myself
sitting upright in bed in my room in Dr. Leete's house, and the
morning sun shining through the open window into my eyes. I was
gasping. The tears were streaming down my face, and I quivered in
every nerve.

* * * * *

As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and
brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to
see the heaven's vault spread above him, so it was with me, as I
realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream,
and my presence in the twentieth was the reality.

The cruel sights which I had witnessed in my vision, and could so well
confirm from the experience of my former life, though they had, alas!
once been, and must in the retrospect to the end of time move the
compassionate to tears, were, God be thanked, forever gone by. Long
ago oppressor and oppressed, prophet and scorner, had been dust. For
generations, rich and poor had been forgotten words.

But in that moment, while yet I mused with unspeakable thankfulness
upon the greatness of the world's salvation and my privilege in
beholding it, there suddenly pierced me like a knife a pang of shame,
remorse, and wondering self-reproach, that bowed my head upon my
breast and made me wish the grave had hid me with my fellows from the
sun. For I had been a man of that former time. What had I done to help
on the deliverance whereat I now presumed to rejoice? I who had lived
in those cruel, insensate days, what had I done to bring them to an
end? I had been every whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of my
brothers, as cynically incredulous of better things, as besotted a
worshipper of Chaos and Old Night, as any of my fellows. So far as my
personal influence went, it had been exerted rather to hinder than to
help forward the enfranchisement of the race which was even then
preparing. What right had I to hail a salvation which reproached me,
to rejoice in a day whose dawning I had mocked?

"Better for you, better for you," a voice within me rang, "had this
evil dre