The brutalisation is so extreme that while it is still fresh in one’s mind, one would as soon express belief in God or man or the future of humanity or in a Utopia, or anything else of the sort, as give utterance to something that one knows to be a vile deception.  What is the sense of our sentimentalising over man’s dignity, his divine destiny, when such fearful, inane injustice is wrought upon innocent persons and cannot be undone?”

Frederick turned very pale.  He was seized by a violent attack of nausea.  His lids opened wide, his eyes popped with a curious expression of horror.  He trembled slightly, and in some alarm clutched impetuously at his friend’s arm.  His brain reeled dully as he felt the ground beneath his feet beginning to heave.

“I have never had anything like this before,” he said.  “I think the accident has left me with something.”

Peter Schmidt led his friend to a bench, which fortunately happened to be close by.  He saw it was a nervous attack.  Frederick’s hands turned numb, cold sweat broke out on his body, and he suddenly fell over in a faint.  When he awoke, it took some time for him to recognise his surroundings.  He said things meant for somebody else.  He thought he saw his wife, then his children, and then his father in full uniform.  When he regained complete consciousness, he implored his friend to keep the incident a secret.  Peter Schmidt promised he would.

“My opinion is,” he said, “that your over-wrought, over-taxed nerves are in revolt.  They are taking revenge and at the same time curing themselves.”

“Though I have inherited the strongest constitution from both my father’s and mother’s sides,” said Frederick, “yet, from last summer on, I have been assailed by so many things that I have long been expecting a collapse.  I know this will not be the last attack.  I should have cause for rejoicing were the condition not to become chronic.”

“Oh,” said Schmidt, “you may have two or three more attacks, but if you live quietly for a few months, they may never recur again.”

In coming out of his swoon Frederick, as he himself said, returned from a trip around the world.  He had travelled through the axis of the earth to the antipodes, which actually did hang head downward.

“I felt as if I had been dead and had come back to life,” he said, trying to give his friend a conception of the remarkable state through which he had passed.  “It was not like being asleep.  During the first part of my dreams, I felt as if I had been something like a block of granite for hundreds of years.  On awaking I stood in the shadow of the deepest abyss.  I saw subterranean landscapes, gigantic caves, heavens of stone, enormous Adelsberg grottoes.  Something lifted me up.  The only thing I can compare it to was the way a diver must feel who slowly, slowly rises to brighter and brighter regions from ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea.  I felt as if I were forcing myself up