or conjecture. I merely found myself walking in a forest, half-clad,
footsore, unutterably weary and hungry. Seeing a farmhouse, I
approached and asked for food, which was given me by one who inquired
my name. I did not know, yet knew that all had names. Greatly
embarrassed, I retreated, and night coming on, lay down in the forest
and slept.

The next day I entered a large town which I shall not name. Nor
shall I recount further incidents of the life that is now to end--a
life of wandering, always and everywhere haunted by an overmastering
sense of crime in punishment of wrong and of terror in punishment of
crime. Let me see if I can reduce it to narrative.

I seem once to have lived near a great city, a prosperous planter,
married to a woman whom I loved and distrusted. We had, it sometimes
seems, one child, a youth of brilliant parts and promise. He is at
all times a vague figure, never clearly drawn, frequently altogether
out of the picture.

One luckless evening it occurred to me to test my wife's fidelity in
a vulgar, commonplace way familiar to everyone who has acquaintance
with the literature of fact and fiction. I went to the city, telling
my wife that I should be absent until the following afternoon. But I
returned before daybreak and went to the rear of the house, purposing
to enter by a door with which I had secretly so tampered that it
would seem to lock, yet not actually fasten. As I approached it, I
heard it gently open and close, and saw a man steal away into the
darkness. With murder in my heart, I sprang after him, but he had
vanished without even the bad luck of identification. Sometimes now
I cannot even persuade myself that it was a human being.