live. He
was anxious to sleep, but drowsy dullness kept away. His mind began to
visualize of its own accord, independent of his will; and, one after
another, a crowd of pictures rose vivid in the darkness of his brain. He
saw them as plainly as you see this page, but with a different
clearness--for they seemed unnatural, belonging to a morbid world. Nor
did one suggest the other; there was no connection between them; each
came vivid of its own accord.

First it was an old pit-frame on a barren moor, gaunt, against the
yellow west. Gourlay saw bars of iron, left when the pit was abandoned,
reddened by the rain; and the mounds of rubbish, and the scattered
bricks, and the rusty clinkers from the furnace, and the melancholy
shining pools. A four-wheeled old trolley had lost two of its wheels,
and was tilted at a slant, one square end of it resting on the ground.

"Why do I think of an old pit?" he thought angrily; "curse it! why can't
I sleep?"

Next moment he was gazing at a ruined castle, its mouldering walls
mounded atop with decaying rubble; from a loose crumb of mortar a long,
thin film of the spider's weaving stretched bellying away to a tall weed
waving on the crazy brink. Gourlay saw its glisten in the wind. He saw
each crack in the wall, each stain of lichen; a myriad details stamped
themselves together on his raw mind. Then a constant procession of
figures passed across the inner curtain of his closed eyes. Each figure
was cowled; but when it came directly opposite, it turned and looked at
him with a white face. "Stop, stop!" cried his mind; "I don't want to
think of you, I don't want to think of you, I don't want to think of
you! Go away!" But as they came of themselves, so they went of
themselves. He could not banish them.

He turned on his side, but a hundred other pictures pursued him. From
an inland hollow he saw the great dawn flooding up from the sea, over a
sharp line of cliff, wave after wave of brilliance surging up the
heavens. The landward slope of the cliff was gray with dew. The inland
hollow was full of little fields, divided by stone walls, and he could
not have recalled the fields round Barbie with half their distinctness.
For a moment they possessed his brain. Then an autumn wood rose on his
vision. He was gazing down a vista of yellow leaves; a long, deep
slanting cleft, framed in lit foliage. Leaves, leaves; everywhere yellow
leaves, luminous, burning. He saw them falling through the lucid