If we could arrive at the feelings of a fish of the northern ocean
around which the waters suddenly rose to tropical temperature, and
swarmed with strange forms of life, uncouth and threatening, we
should have a fair symbol of the mental condition in which Thomas
Wingfold now found himself. The spiritual fluid in which his being
floated had become all at once more potent, and he was in
consequence uncomfortable. A certain intermittent stinging, as if
from the flashes of some moral electricity, had begun to pass in
various directions through the crude and chaotic mass he called
himself, and he felt strangely restless. It never occurred to
him--as how should it?--that he might have commenced undergoing the
most marvellous of all changes,--one so marvellous, indeed, that for
a man to foreknow its result or understand what he was passing
through, would be more strange than that a caterpillar should
recognise in the rainbow-winged butterfly hovering over the flower
at whose leaf he was gnawing, the perfected idea of his own
potential self--I mean the change of being born again. Nor were the
symptoms such as would necessarily have suggested, even to a man
experienced in the natural history of the infinite, that the process
had commenced.

A restless night followed his reflections in the churchyard, and he
did not wake at all comfortable. Not that ever he had been in the
way of feeling comfortable. To him life had not been a land flowing
with milk and honey. He had had few smiles, and not many of those
grasps of the hand which let a man know another man is near him in
the battle--for had it not been something of a battle, how could he
have come to the age of six-and-twenty without being worse than he