und 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 worshiper 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 dream been the reality, and this fair reality the dream; better
your part pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation,
than here, drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whose
husbandmen you stoned"; and my spirit answered, "Better, truly."

When at length I raised my bowed head and looked forth from the window,
Edith, fresh as the morning, had come into the garden and was gathering
flowers. I hastened to d