and appalling shape.  He did not know before how much he cared to live.  All his old recollections came before him as it were in one long, vivid flash.  The closed vista of memory opened to its far horizon-line, and past and present were pictured in a single instant of clear vision.  The dread moment which had blighted his life returned in all its terror.  He felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,—­the rush of air,—­the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into which he was precipitated.  One after another those paralyzing seizures which had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence.  The pictures passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if simultaneous.  The vision of the “inward eye” was so intensified in this moment of peril that an instant was like an hour of common existence.  Those who have been very near drowning know well what this description means.  The development of a photograph may not explain it, but it illustrates the curious and familiar fact of the revived recollections of the drowning man’s experience.  The sensitive plate has taken one look at a scene, and remembers it all,

Every little circumstance is there,—­the hoof in air, the wing in flight, the leaf as it falls, the wave as it breaks.  All there, but invisible; potentially present, but impalpable, inappreciable, as if not existing at all.  A wash is poured over it, and the whole scene comes out in all its perfection of detail.  In those supreme moments when death stares a man suddenly in the face the rush of unwonted emotion floods the undeveloped pictures of vanished years, stored away in the memory, the vast panorama of a lifetime, and in one swift instant the past comes out as vividly as if it were again the present.  So it was at this moment with the sick man, as he lay helpless and felt that he was left to die.  For he saw no hope of relief:  the smoke was drifting in clouds into the room; the flames were very near; if he was not reached and rescued immediately it was all over with him.

His past life had flashed before him.  Then all at once rose the thought of his future,—­of all its possibilities, of the vague hopes which he had cherished of late that his mysterious doom would be lifted from him.  There was something, then, to be lived for, something!  There was a new life, it might be, in store for him, and such a new life!  He thought of all he was losing.  Oh, could he but have lived to know the meaning of love!  And the passionate desire of life came over him,—­not the dread of death, but the longing for what the future might yet have of happiness for him.

All this took place in the course of a very few moments.  Dreams and visions have little to do with measured time, and ten minutes, possibly fifteen or twenty, were all that had passed since the beginning of those nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested by the suffocating air he was breathing.