have derived from it would fill a volume; but if it did, I may add, I
myself should undoubtedly fill a cell in Holloway. I will therefore
spare you what I know about the Doctor's wife, and what happens to
Lieutenant-Colonel Storter when I see him through these windows--I
could never have believed it unless I had seen it. These things are
not done, I know; but observed in this medium they seem quite
ordinary. Lastly--for I can't go through the catalogue--I will speak
of the air as I see it from here. My dear sir, the air is alive,
thronged with life. Spirits, forms, lovely immaterial diaphanous
shapes, are weaving endless patterns over the face of the day. They
shine like salmon at a weir, or they darken the sky as redwings in the
autumn fields; they circle, shrieking as they flash, like swallows at
evening; they battle and wrangle together; or they join hands and
whirl about the square in an endless chain. Of their beauty, their
grace of form and movement, of the shifting filmy colour, hue blending
in hue, of their swiftness, their glancing eyes, their exuberant joy
or grief I cannot now speak. Beside them one man may well seem rat,
and another goat. Beside them, indeed, you look for nothing else. And
if I go on to hint that the owner of these windows is of them, though
imprisoned in my house; that he does at times join them in their
streaming flights beyond the housetops, and does at times carry with
him his half-bewildered, half-shocked and wholly delighted fellow
lodgers, I have come to the end of my tether and your credulity, and,
for the time at least, have flowered myself to death. The figure is as
good as Plato's though my Pegasus will never stable in his stall.

* * * * *

We may believe ourselves to be two persons, at least, in one, and I
fancy that one at least of them is a constant. So far as my own pair