years ago. It is as vivid in memory as anything that I have ever
seen in the outward world, as distinct as any experience through
which I have ever passed. Not all dreams are thus remembered. But
some are. In the records of the mind, where the inner chronicle of
life is written, they are intensely clear and veridical. I shall
try to tell the story of this dream with an absolute faithfulness,
adding nothing and leaving nothing out, but writing the narrative
just as if the thing were real.

Perhaps it was. Who can say?

In the course of a journey, of the beginning and end of which
I know nothing, I had come to a great city, whose name, if it was
ever told me, I cannot recall.

It was evidently a very ancient place. The dwelling-houses and
larger buildings were gray and beautiful with age, and the streets
wound in and out among them wonderfully, like a maze.

This city lay beside a river or estuary--though that was something
that I did not find out until later, as you will see--and the newer
part of the town extended mainly on a wide, bare street running
along a kind of low cliff or embankment, where the basements of
the small houses on the water-side went down, below the level of
the street, to the shore. But the older part of the town was closely
and intricately built, with gabled roofs and heavy carved facades
hanging over the narrow stone-paved ways, which here and there
led out suddenly into open squares.

It was in what appeared to be the largest and most important of