I dreamed that I found myself underground in a vault artificially lighted.  Tables were ranged along the walls of the vault, and upon these tables were bound down the living bodies of half-dissected and mutilated animals.  Scientific experts were busy at work on their victims with scalpel, hot iron and forceps.  But, as I looked at the creatures lying bound before them, they no longer appeared to be mere rabbits, or hounds, for in each I saw a human shape, the shape of a man, with limbs and lineaments resembling those of their torturers, hidden within the outward form.  And when they led into the place an old worn-out horse, crippled with age and long toil in the service of man, and bound him down, and lacerated his flesh with their knives, I saw the human form within him stir and writhe as though it were an unborn babe moving in its mother’s womb.  And I cried aloud—­“Wretches! you are tormenting an unborn man!” But they heard not, nor could they see what I saw.  Then they brought in a white rabbit, and thrust its eyes through with heated irons.  And as I gazed, the rabbit seemed to me like a tiny infant, with human face, and hands which stretched themselves towards me in appeal, and lips which sought to cry for help in human accents.  And I could bear no more, but broke forth into a bitter rain of tears, exclaiming—­“O blind! blind! not to see that you torture a child, the youngest of your own flesh and blood!”

And with that I woke, sobbing vehemently.

—­Paris, Feb. 2, 1880

XV.  The Old Young Man

I dreamed that I was in Rome with C., and a friend of his called on us there, and asked leave to introduce to us a young man, a student of art, whose history and condition were singular.  They came together in the evening.  In the room where we sat was a kind of telephonic tube, through which, at intervals, a voice spoke to me.  When the young man entered, these words were spoken in my ear through the tube:—­

“You have made a good many diagnoses lately of cases of physical disease; here is a curious and interesting type of spiritual pathology, the like of which is rarely met with.  Question this young man.”

Accordingly I did so, and drew from him that about a year ago he had been seriously ill of Roman fever; but as he hesitated, and seemed unwilling to speak on the subject, I questioned the friend.  From him I learnt that the young man had formerly been a very proficient pupil in one of the best-known studios in Rome, but that a year ago he had suffered from a most terrible attack of malaria, in consequence of his remaining in Rome to work after others had found it necessary to go into the country, and that the malady had so affected the nervous system that since his recovery he had been wholly unlike his former self.  His great aptitude for artistic work, from which so much had been expected, seemed