What a wonderful thing waking is!  The time of the ghostly moonshine passes by, and the great positive sunlight comes.  A man who dreams, and knows that he is dreaming, thinks he knows what waking is; but knows it so little that he mistakes, one after another, many a vague and dim change in his dream for an awaking.  When the true waking comes at last, he is filled and overflowed with the power of its reality.  So, likewise, one who, in the darkness, lies waiting for the light about to be struck, and trying to conceive, with all the force of his imagination, what the light will be like, is yet, when the reality flames up before him, seized as by a new and unexpected thing, different from and beyond all his imagining.  He feels as if the darkness were cast to an infinite distance behind him.  So shall it be with us when we wake from this dream of life into the truer life beyond, and find all our present notions of being thrown back as into a dim vapoury region of dreamland, where yet we thought we knew, and whence we looked forward into the present.  This must be what Novalis means when he says:  “Our life is not a dream; but it may become a dream, and perhaps ought to become one.”

And so I look back upon the strange history of my past, sometimes asking myself:  “Can it be that all this has really happened to the same me, who am now thinking about it in doubt and wonderment?”

III

THE SUPERSTITIOUS MAN’S STORY

By THOMAS HARDY

“There was something very strange about William’s death—­very strange indeed!” sighed a melancholy man in the back of the van.  It was the seedman’s father, who had hitherto kept silence.

“And what might that have been?” asked Mr Lackland.

“William, as you may know, was a curious, silent man; you could feel when he came near ’ee; and if he was in the house or anywhere behind you without your seeing him, there seemed to be something clammy in the air, as if a cellar door opened close by your elbow.  Well, one Sunday, at a time that William was in very good health to all appearance, the bell that was ringing for church went very heavy all of a sudden; the sexton, who told me o’t, said he had not known the bell go so heavy in his hand for years—­it was just as if the gudgeons wanted oiling.  That was on the Sunday, as I say.

“During the week after, it chanced that William’s wife was staying up late one night to finish her ironing, she doing the washing for Mr and Mrs Hardcome.  Her husband had finished his supper, and gone to bed as usual some hour or two before.  While she ironed she heard him coming downstairs; he stopped to put on his boots at the stair-foot, where he always left them, and then came on into the living-room where she was ironing, passing through it towards the door, this being the only way from the staircase to the outside of the house.  No word was said on either