it, swifter than a frightened fish.  It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable, fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for the next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements.  And he was growing more and more nervous in his work.  It was as if a little picture of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust from his brain another picture of a cut falling short of the mark.  He was afraid:  his dread of cutting too little was battling with his dread of cutting too far.

Then, suddenly, like an escape of water from under a lock-gate, a great uprush of horrible realisation set all his thoughts swirling, and simultaneously I perceived that the vein was cut.  He started back with a hoarse exclamation, and I saw the brown-purple blood gather in a swift bead, and run trickling.  He was horrified.  He pitched the red-stained scalpel on to the octagonal table; and instantly both doctors flung themselves upon me, making hasty and ill-conceived efforts to remedy the disaster.  “Ice!” said Mowbray, gasping.  But I knew that I was killed, though my body still clung to me.

I will not describe their belated endeavours to save me, though I perceived every detail.  My perceptions were sharper and swifter than they had ever been in life; my thoughts rushed through my mind with incredible swiftness, but with perfect definition.  I can only compare their crowded clarity to the effects of a reasonable dose of opium.  In a moment it would all be over, and I should be free.  I knew I was immortal, but what would happen I did not know.  Should I drift off presently, like a puff of smoke from a gun, in some kind of half-material body, an attenuated version of my material self?  Should I find myself suddenly among the innumerable hosts of the dead, and know the world about me for the phantasmagoria it had always seemed?  Should I drift to some spiritualistic seance, and there make foolish, incomprehensible attempts to affect a purblind medium?  It was a state of unemotional curiosity, of colourless expectation.  And then I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body.  The stress grew and grew.  I seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were fighting.  For one brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me.  That feeling of falling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand times intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts in a torrent.  Then the two doctors, the naked body with its cut side, the little room, swept away from under me and vanished, as a speck of foam vanishes down an eddy.