rue
sleep began. At last he saw the brushwood-pile, and hurried along to
the ridge, for behind him he felt was the wide-awake, sultry world.
He reached the lamp in safety, tingling with drowsiness, when a
policeman--a common country policeman--sprang up before him and touched
him on the shoulder ere he could dive into the dim valley below. He was
filled with terror,--the hopeless terror of dreams,--for the policeman
said, in the awful, distinct voice of dream-people, "I am Policeman Day
coming back from the City of Sleep. You come with me." Georgie knew it
was true--that just beyond him in the valley lay the lights of the
City of Sleep, where he would have been sheltered, and that this
Policeman-Thing had full power and authority to head him back to
miserable wakefulness. He found himself looking at the moonlight on the
wall, dripping with fright; and he never overcame that horror, though he
met the Policeman several times that hot weather, and his coming was the
forerunner of a bad night.

But other dreams-perfectly absurd ones-filled him with an incommunicable
delight. All those that he remembered began by the brushwood-pile. For
instance, he found a small clockwork steamer (he had noticed it many
nights before) lying by the sea-road, and stepped into it, whereupon it
moved with surpassing swiftness over an absolutely level sea. This was
glorious, for he felt he was exploring great matters; and it stopped
by a lily carved in stone, which, most naturally, floated on the water.
Seeing the lily was labelled "Hong-Kong," Georgie said: "Of course. This
is precisely what I expected Hong-Kong would be like. How magnificent!"
Thousands of miles farther on it halted at yet another stone lily,
labelled "Java."; and this, again, delighted him hugely, because he knew
that now he was at the world's end. But the little boat ran on and on
till it lay in a deep fresh-water lock, the sides of which were carven
marble, green with moss. Lilypads lay on the water, and reeds arched
above. Some one moved among the reeds--some one whom Georgie knew he
had travelled to this world's end to reach. Therefore everything was
entirely well with him. He was unspeakably happy, and vaulted over the
ship's side to find this person. When his feet touched that still water,
it changed, with the rustle of unrolling maps, to nothing less than a
sixth quarter of the globe, beyond the most remote imagining of man--a
place where islands were coloured yellow a