whimpering a little, perhaps, I fumbled back to bed.  “It is surely a dream,” I whispered to myself as I clambered back, “surely a dream.”  It was a senile repetition.  I pulled the bedclothes over my shoulders, over my ears, I thrust my withered hand under the pillow, and determined to compose myself to sleep.  Of course it was a dream.  In the morning the dream would be over, and I should wake up strong and vigorous again to my youth and studies.  I shut my eyes, breathed regularly, and, finding myself wakeful, began to count slowly through the powers of three.

But the thing I desired would not come.  I could not get to sleep.  And the persuasion of the inexorable reality of the change that had happened to me grew steadily.  Presently I found myself with my eyes wide open, the powers of three forgotten, and my skinny fingers upon my shrivelled gums, I was, indeed, suddenly and abruptly, an old man.  I had in some unaccountable manner fallen through my life and come to old age, in some way I had been cheated of all the best of my life, of love, of struggle, of strength, and hope.  I grovelled into the pillow and tried to persuade myself that such hallucination was possible.  Imperceptibly, steadily, the dawn grew clearer.

At last, despairing of further sleep, I sat up in bed and looked about me.  A chill twilight rendered the whole chamber visible.  It was spacious and well-furnished, better furnished than any room I had ever slept in before.  A candle and matches became dimly visible upon a little pedestal in a recess.  I threw back the bedclothes, and, shivering with the rawness of the early morning, albeit it was summer-time, I got out and lit the candle.  Then, trembling horribly, so that the extinguisher rattled on its spike, I tottered to the glass and saw—­Elvesham’s face!  It was none the less horrible because I had already dimly feared as much.  He had already seemed physically weak and pitiful to me, but seen now, dressed only in a coarse flannel nightdress, that fell apart and showed the stringy neck, seen now as my own body, I cannot describe its desolate decrepitude.  The hollow cheeks, the straggling tail of dirty grey hair, the rheumy bleared eyes, the quivering, shrivelled lips, the lower displaying a gleam of the pink interior lining, and those horrible dark gums showing.  You who are mind and body together, at your natural years, cannot imagine what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me.  To be young and full of the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught, and presently to be crushed in this tottering ruin of a body...

But I wander from the course of my story.  For some time I must have been stunned at this change that had come upon me.  It was daylight when I did so far gather myself together as to think.  In some inexplicable way I had been changed, though how, short of magic, the thing had been done, I could not say.  And as I thought, the diabolical ingenuity of Elvesham came home to me.  It seemed plain