I shall go mad—­I am mad—­I am gone to the devil—­I have lost my identity; who knows in what place, in what age of the world I am living now?  Yet I will be calm; I have seen all these things before, in pictures surely, or something like them.  I am resigned, since it is no worse than that.  I am a priest then, in the dim, far-off thirteenth century, riding, about midnight I should say, to carry the blessed Sacrament to some dying man.

Soon I found that I was not alone; a man was riding close to me on a horse; he was fantastically dressed, more so than usual for that time, being striped all over in vertical stripes of yellow and green, with quaint birds like exaggerated storks in different attitudes counter-changed on the stripes; all this I saw by the lantern he carried, in the light of which his debauched black eyes quite flashed.  On he went, unsteadily rolling, very drunk, though it was the thirteenth century, but being plainly used to that, he sat his horse fairly well.

I watched him in my proper nineteenth-century character, with insatiable curiosity and intense amusement; but as a quiet priest of a long-past age, with contempt and disgust enough, not unmixed with fear and anxiety.

He roared out snatches of doggrel verse as he went along, drinking songs, hunting songs, robbing songs, lust songs, in a voice that sounded far and far above the roaring of the wind, though that was high, and rolled along the dark road that his lantern cast spikes of light along ever so far, making the devils grin:  and meanwhile I, the priest, glanced from him wrathfully every now and then to That which I carried very reverently in my hand, and my blood curdled with shame and indignation; but being a shrewd priest, I knew well enough that a sermon would be utterly thrown away on a man who was drunk every day in the year, and, more especially, very drunk then.  So I held my peace, saying only under my breath: 

“Dixit incipiens in corde suo, Non est Deus.  Corrupti sunt et abominables facti sunt in studiis suis; non est qui faciat bonum, non est usque ad unum:  sepulchrum patens est guttur eorum; linguis suis dolose agebunt, venenum aspidum sub labiis eorum.  Dominum non invocaverunt; illic trepid-averunt timore, ubi non erat timor.  Quis dabit ex Sion salutare Israel?”

and so I went on, thinking too at times about the man who was dying and whom I was soon to see:  he had been a bold bad plundering baron, but was said lately to have altered his way of life, having seen a miracle or some such thing; he had departed to keep a tournament near his castle lately, but had been brought back sore wounded, so this drunken servant, with some difficulty and much unseasonable merriment, had made me understand, and now lay at the point of death, brought about by unskilful tending and such like.  Then I thought of his face—­a bad face, very bad, retreating forehead, small twinkling eyes, projecting lower jaw; and such a voice, too, he had! like the grunt of a bear mostly.