assimilate their theories to the hazy romance of
youth? I can well conceive that the story I tell will be regarded by
most as a wild and fantastic fable; that by some it may be considered a
vehicle for guesses at various riddles of Nature, without or within
us, which are free to the license of romance, though forbidden to the
caution of science. But, I--I--know unmistakably my own identity, my
own positive place in a substantial universe. And beyond that knowledge,
what do I know? Yet had Faber no ground for his startling parallels
between the chimeras of superstition and the alternatives to faith
volunteered by the metaphysical speculations of knowledge? On the
theorems of Condillac, I, in common with numberless contemporaneous
students (for, in my youth, Condillac held sway in the schools, as now,
driven forth from the schools, his opinions float loose through the
talk and the scribble of men of the world, who perhaps never opened his
page),--on the theorems of Condillac I had built up a system of thought
designed to immure the swathed form of material philosophy from all
rays and all sounds of a world not material, as the walls of some blind
mausoleum shut out, from the mummy within, the whisper of winds and the
gleaming of stars.

And did not those very theorems, when carried out to their strict and
completing results by the close reasonings of Hume, resolve my own
living identity, the one conscious indivisible me, into a bundle
of memories derived from the senses which had bubbled and duped my
experience, and reduce into a phantom, as spectral as that of the
Luminous Shadow, the whole solid frame of creation?

While pondering these questions, the storm whose forewarnings I had
neglected to heed burst forth with all the suddenness peculiar to the
Australian climes. The rains descended like the rushing of floods. In
the beds of watercourses, which, at noon, seemed dried up and exhausted,
the torrents began to swell and to rave; the gray crags around them were
animated into living waterfalls. I looked round, and the landscape was
as changed as a scene that replaces a scene on the player's stage. I
was aware that I had wandered far from my home, and I knew not what
direction I should take to regain it. Close at hand, and raised above
the torrents that now rushed in many a gully and tributary creek, around
and before me, the mouth of a deep cave, overgrown with bushes and
creeping flowers tossed wildly to and fro betw