And then I had a glimpse....  I was in the bedroom, near the windows, all the time, but nevertheless I was nowhere, nowhere in space.  I could feel the roll of the earth as it turned lumberingly on its axis—­a faint shaking which did not affect me.  Still, I was in the bedroom, near the windows.  And I had a glimpse....  The heralds of a new vitality swept trumpeting through me, and a calm, intense, ineffable joy followed in their train.  I had a glimpse....  And my eyes were not dazzled.  I yearned and strained towards what I saw, towards the exceeding brightness of undreamt companionships, hopes, perceptions, activities, and sorrows.  Yes, sorrows!  But what noble sorrows they were that I felt awaited me there!  I strained at my mysterious bonds.  It seemed that they were about to break and that I should be winged away into other dimensions....

And then, I knew that they were tightening again, and the brightness very slowly faded, and I lost faith in the gift of vision which momentarily had enabled me to see the illusions and the littleness of the world.  And I was slowly, slowly drawn away from the window....  And then I felt heavy weights on my eyes, and I could not move my jaw.  I shuddered convulsively, and a coin struck the floor and ran till it fell flat.  And the door swiftly opened....

V

Yes, my whole character is changed, within; though externally it may seem the same.  Externally I may seem to have resumed the affections and the interests which occupied me before my illness and my remarkable recovery.  Yet I am different.  Certainly I have lost again the strange transcendental knowledge which was mine for a few instants.  Certainly I have descended again to the earthly level.  All those magic things have slipped away, except hope.  In a sure hope, in a positive faith, I am waiting.  I am waiting for all that magic to happen to me again.  I know that the pain of loneliness, when again I shall see my own body from the outside, will be exquisite, but—­the reward!  The reward!  That is what is always at the back of my mind, the source of the calm joy in which I wait.  Externally I am the successful earthenware manufacturer, happily married, getting rich on a china-firing oven, employing a couple of hundred workmen, etcetera, who was once given up for dead.  But I am more than that.  I have seen God.

JOCK-AT-A-VENTURE

I

All this happened at a Martinmas Fair in Bursley, long ago in the fifties, when everybody throughout the Five Towns pronounced Bursley “Bosley” as a matter of course; in the tedious and tragic old times, before it had been discovered that hell was a myth, and before the invention of pleasure or even of half-holidays.  Martinmas was in those days a very important moment in the annual life of the town, for it was at Martinmas that potters’ wages