always believed I was one person,” he thought, “but I am a multitude.  There are at least a million of me—­and any one of them might have crowded out all the others if he’d got a chance.”  A swift and joyous surprise held him for a moment, as though he were conscious for the first time of dormant possibilities in himself which he had never suspected.  “Why didn’t I know this before?” he asked, like one who stumbles by accident upon some simple and yet illuminating fact of nature.  “All this has been in me all the time, but nobody told me.  I might just as well have been any of these other selves as the one I am.”  The noise of the river began in his head again, but it no longer frightened him.

“It’s only the hum of bees in the meadow,” he said after a minute, “and yet it fills the universe as if it were the sound of a battle.  And now I’ve forgotten what I was thinking about.  It was very important, but I shall never remember it.”  He closed his eyes, while the ghostly fragrance of the life-everlasting on which he was lying rose in a cloud to envelop him.  Something brushed his face like the touch of wings, and looking up he saw that it was a golden leaf which had fallen from a bough of the great poplar above him.  He had never seen anything in his life so bright as that golden bough that hung over him, and when he gazed through it, he saw that the sky was bluer than he had ever imagined that it could be, and that everything at which he looked had not only this quality of intense, of penetrating brightness, but appeared transparent, with a luminous transparency which seemed a veil spread over something that was shining beyond it.  “I wonder if I’m dead?” he thought irritably, “or is it only delirium?  And if I am dead, it really doesn’t matter—­an idiot could see through anything so thin as this.”

Again the cloud closed over him, and again just as suddenly it lifted and the joyous surprise awoke in his mind.  He remembered feeling the same sensation in his boyhood, when he had walked one morning at sunrise on a strange road, and had wondered what would happen when he turned a long curve he was approaching.  And it seemed to him now as then, that a trackless, a virgin waste of experience surrounded him—­that he was in the midst of an incalculable vastness of wonder and delight.  It was a nuisance to have this web of flesh wrapping about him, binding his limbs, hindering his efforts, stifling his breath.

And then, as in the brain of a fevered and delirious man, this impression vanished as inexplicably as it had come.  His ideas were perfectly independent of his will.  He could neither recover one that he had lost nor summon a fresh one from the border of obscurity that surrounded a centre of almost intolerable brightness into which his mental images glided as into a brilliantly lighted chamber.  Into this brightness a troop of hallucinations darted suddenly like a motley and ill-assorted company of players.  He saw first a grotesque and indistinct figure, which