his face, too, a long brown beard and heavy moustache; and when I
gazed hard at him mentally, I could recognise the likeness with the
white-bearded man who lay dead on the floor: while in my former
recollection, I could scarcely make out any resemblance of the
features. This showed that the second scene came long after the
first: my father must by that time have begun to resemble his later
self. A weird feeling stole over me. Was I going to relive my
previous life, piecemeal? Was the past going to unroll itself in
slow but regular panorama to my sleeping vision? Was my First State
to become known like this in successive scenes to my Second?

But that wasn't all. There were strange questions to decide, too,
about this new dream of dead days. What could be the meaning of that
mysterious baby? She seemed to be so vivid, so natural, so real; her
presence there was so much a pure matter of course to me, that I
couldn't for a moment separate her from the rest of the Picture. I
REMEMBERED the baby, now; as I remembered my mother, and my father,
and Australia. There was no room for doubt as to that. The baby was
an integral part of my real recollection. Floating across the dim
ocean of years, I was certain that night I had once lived in such a
scene, with my mamma, and baby.

Yet oh, what baby? I never had a brother or sister of my own, except
the half-sister that died--the clergyman's child, Mary Wharton. And
Mary, from what I had learned from Aunt Emma and others, must have
died when I was only just five months old, immediately before we
left Australia. How, then, could I remember her, even in this
exalted mental state of trance or dream? And, above all, how could I
remember a far earlier scene, when my papa was younger, when his
face was smooth, and when there was no other baby?