vague. He has known Zeus in the thunder, in the lightning beheld the
shaking of the dread Ægis. In the river source he has seen the
breasted nymph; he has seen the Oreads stream over the bare hillside.
There are men who see these things and don't believe them, others who
believe but don't see. He has both seen and believed. The painted,
figured universe has for him a new shape; whispering winds and falling
rain speak plainly to his understanding. He has seen trees as men
walking. His helot has unlocked the world behind appearance and made
him free of the Spirits of Natural Fact who abide there. If he is not
the debtor of his comrade--and he protests the debt--he should be. But
the rascal laps it all up, as a cat porridge, without so much as a wag
of the tail for Thank-you. Such are the exorbitant overlords in mortal
men, who pass for reputable persons, with a chief seat at feasts.

Such things, you may say, read incredibly, but, _mutatis mutandis_, I
believe them to be common, though unrecorded, experience. I deprecate
in advance questions designed to test the accuracy of my eyesight or
the ingenuous habit of my pen. I have already declared that the
windows of my first-floor lodger are of such properties that they
show you, in Xenophon's phrase, τὰ ὄντα τε ὡϛ ὄντα, και τὰ μὴ ὄντα ὡϛ
οὐκ ὄνγα. Now consider it from his side. If I were to tell the owner
of those windows that I saw the policeman at the corner, a helmeted,
blue-tunicked, chin-scratching, ponderous man, some six foot in his
boots, how would he take it? Would he not mock me? What, that rat?
Ridiculous! And what on earth could I reply? I tell you, the whole
affair is one of windows, or, sometimes, of personally-conducted
travel; and who is Guide and who Guided, is one of those nice
questions in psychology which perhaps we are not yet ready to handle.
Of the many speculations as to the nature of the subliminal Self I
have never found one to be that he may be a fairy prisoner,