It is said that staid and respectable people, when thoroughly steeped in night, will sometimes break out in wild grimaces and outlandish gesticulations.  It is certainly the time when unlawful thoughts and words come to men most readily and naturally.  Night brings forth many things that daylight starts from.  The real power of darkness lies not in merely baffling the eyesight, but in creating the feeling of darkness in the soul.  The chains of light are broken, and we can almost believe our internal night to be as impenetrable to God’s eyes as that external, to our own!

By and by Helwyse thought he would find some snug place and sit down.  The cabin of the “Empire State” was built on the main deck, abaft the funnel, like a long, low house.  Between the stern end of this house and the taffrail was a small space, thickly grown with camp-stools.  Helwyse groped his way thither, got hold of a couple of the camp-stools, and arranged himself comfortably with his back against the cabin wall.  The waves bubbled invisibly in the wake beneath.  After sitting for a while in the dense blackness, Helwyse began to feel as though his whole physical self were shrivelled into a single atom, careering blindly through infinite space!

After all, and really, was he anything more?  If he chose to think not, what logic could convince him of the contrary?  Visible creation, as any child could tell him, was an illusion,—­was not what it seemed to be.  But this darkness was no illusion!  Why, then, was it not the only reality? and he but an atom, charged with a vital power of so-called senses, that generally deceived him, but sometimes—­as now—­let him glimpse the truth?  The fancy, absurd as it was, had its attraction for the time being.  This great living, staring world of men and things is a terrible weight to lug upon one’s back.  But if man be an invisible atom, what a vast, wild, boundless freedom is his!  Infinite space is wide enough to cut any caper in, and no one the wiser.

One would like to converse with a man who had been born and had lived in solitude and darkness.  What original views he would have about himself and life!  Would he think himself an abstract intelligence, out of space and time?  What a riddle his physical sensations would be to him!  Or, suppose him to meet with another being brought up in the same way; how they would mystify each other!  Would they learn to feel shame, love, hate? or do the passions only grow in sunshine?  Would they ever laugh?  Would they hatch plots against each other, lie, deceive?  Would they have secrets from each other?

But, fancy aside, take a supposable case.  Suppose two sinners of our daylight world to meet for the first time, mutually unknown, on a night like this.  Invisible, only audible, how might they plunge profound into most naked intimacy,—­read aloud to each other the secrets of their deepest hearts!  Would the confession lighten their souls, or make them twice as heavy as before?  Then, the next morning, they might meet and pass, unrecognizing and unrecognized.  But would the knot binding them to each other be any the less real, because neither knew to whom he was tied?  Some day, in the midst of friends, in the brightest glare of the sunshine, the tone of a voice would strike them pale and cold.