Then when rainy days came we crouched together in the cave like night-birds sheltered from the day, and we whispered and recounted and planned.  I scribbled in my diary in pencil, and he re-wrote my scribbling in bright-coloured chalks, and drew side pictures and wrote poems.  Many are the pages we thus wrote together; some he wrote, some I wrote, and there are many from both of us in this volume.  When I thought to make a book he laughed and said, “You are making to yourself a graven image.”  He held it idolatry to imagine that beautiful visions could be represented in words.

“I shall not worship the book,” I urged.

“Other people may, or they may revile it,” he answered, laughing.  “It’s the same sin.”

“Lest they worship or revile idolatrously, I shall write a notice,” said I.  “For though I praise Nature ill, and express her ill, she, the wonderful spirit, is beyond all praise or blame.”  And I wrote these words:  “Lest any one should think that in these pages life itself is accounted for, any beauty set down in words, any yearning defined, or sadness utterly plumbed, it is hereby notified that such appreciation is false—­that in these pages lies only the symbol of life, the guide-post to the hearts of those who wrote the words.  Follow, gentle reader, the directions we have given; tread the roads that we have trod, and see again what we have seen.”

To which I added this note:  “The poetry is from my companion’s pen, the prose from mine.”

And my companion, not content with that, wrote a postscript:  “There is no prose, and the pen by itself writes nothing at all.”

II.  HOW MY COMPANION FOUND HIMSELF IN A COACH

“There is one event in my life that I cannot account for,” said my companion, “and it has conditioned all my living, an event psychologically strange.  I appear, in a way, to have lost my memory at one era of my existence.  I look at the event I am going to relate, and simply stare in perplexed wonder.  Somewhere, somewhen, I lost something in my mind!  What was that something?

“Most people can tell the story of their life as they themselves remember it.  Their memory takes them back to their earliest years, and the memory seems satisfactory to them.  But there is a mystery in mine which to my mind remains unexplained.  I remember nothing before the age of twenty-one.  As far as my memory is concerned I might have been born then.  More strange still, I recognise nothing of a past before then, and no one comes out of that past and claims recognition of me.

“This I remember in a dim phantasmal way as the very beginning of things:  my getting into a coach in a white mist.  Even in that I constantly feel a doubt that my imagination has been playing false with memory.  Certainly I do remember finding myself in a coach, but at the startled moment when my conscious life began, it appeared to me that I had never been anywhere in my life but sitting in the coach.  A certain intellectual horror vacuum may have evoked that mental image of an entering of the coach, but even then I wholly fail to fill in the life and place from which I came.  All behind that strange misty entering on the coach-steps is grey, empty mist-land.