He had been with me then nearly four years, and I had learned to know the symptoms:—­restlessness, followed by hours of depressed and sullen brooding.  So I had heretofore in a sense been forewarned, though I never witnessed one of these outbursts without being shaken to the depths.  This one was different—­as if the evil force had invaded him suddenly, giving him no time to resist.  A glance at his face made me lay aside the book hurriedly; for this was no ordinary struggle.  The words that had come to me at first came back now with redoubled meaning, and rang through my head like passing-bells: 

“For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against ... the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness.”

He tilted his head, looked upward, and swore steadily.  As for me, my throat felt as if it had been choked with ashes.  I could only stare at him, dumbly.  If ever a man was possessed, he was.  His voice rose, querulously: 

“I get up in the morning, and I catch bugs, and I study them, and I dry them—­and I go to bed.  I get up in the morning, and I catch bugs, and I study them, and I dry them—­and I go to bed.  I get up every morning, and I do the same damn thing, over and over and over and over, day in, day out, day in, day out.  Nothing else....  No drinks, no lights, no girls, no sprees, no cards, no gang, no risks, no jobs, no bulls, no anything!  God!  I could say my prayers to Broadway, anywhere from the Battery up to Columbus Circle!  I want it all so hard I could point my nose like a lost dog and howl for it!

“...  There is a Dutchman got a restaurant down on Eighth Avenue, and I dream at nights about the hotdog-and-kraut, and the ham-and that they give you there, and the jane that slings it.  Hips on her like a horse, she has, and an arm that shoves your eats under your nose in a way you’ve got to respect.  I smell those eats in my sleep.  I want some more Childs’ bucks.  I want to see the electrics winking on the roofs.  I want to smell wet asphalt and see the taxis whizzing by in the rain.  I want to see a seven-foot Mick cop with a back like a piano-box and a paw like a ham and a foot like a submarine with stove-polish on it.  I want to see the subway in the rush hour and the dips and mollbuzzers going through the crowd like kids in a berry patch.  I want to see a ninety-story building going up, and the wops crawling on it like ants.  I want to see the breadline, and the panhandlers, and the bums in Union Square.  I want a bellyful of the happy dust the old town hands out—­the whole dope and all there is of it!  My God!  I want everything I haven’t got!”

He looked at me, wildly.  He was trembling violently, and sweat poured down his face.

“Parson,” he rasped, “I’ve bucked this thing for fair, but I’ve got to go back and see it and smell it and taste it and feel it and know it all again, or I’ll go crazy.  You’re all of you so good down here you’re too much for me. I’m home-sick for hell.  It—­it comes over me like fire over the damned.  You don’t fool yourself that folks who know what it is to be damned can stay on in heaven without freezing, do you?  Well, they can’t.  I can’t help it!  I can’t!  I’ve got to go—­this time I’ve got to go!”