Hugh's mind, as he sat in the darkness on the cliff above the river that
night in Burlington, was deeply stirred. Again he was a boy lying in the
woods above his river, and the visions that had come to him there returned
with startling clearness. He got off the log and lying in the wet grass,
closed his eyes. His body became warm.

Hugh thought his mind had gone out of his body and up into the sky to join
the clouds and the stars, to play with them. From the sky he thought he
looked down on the earth and saw rolling fields, hills and forests. He had
no part in the lives of the men and women of the earth, but was torn away
from them, left to stand by himself. From his place in the sky above the
earth he saw the great river going majestically along. For a time it was
quiet and contemplative as the sky had been when he was a boy down below
lying on his belly in the wood. He saw men pass in boats and could hear
their voices dimly. A great quiet prevailed and he looked abroad beyond the
wide expanse of the river and saw fields and towns. They were all hushed
and still. An air of waiting hung over them. And then the river was whipped
into action by some strange unknown force, something that had come out of a
distant place, out of the place to which the cloud had gone and from which
it had returned to stir and agitate the other clouds.

The river now went tearing along. It overflowed its banks and swept over
the land, uprooting trees and forests and towns. The white faces of drowned
men and children, borne along by the flood, looked up into the mind's eye
of the man Hugh, who, in the moment of his setting out into the definite
world of struggle and defeat, had let himself slip back into the vaporous
dreams of his boyhood.

As he lay in the wet grass in the darkness on the cliff Hugh tried to force
his way back to consciousness, but for a long time was unsuccessful. He