unutterable things--through the snow-clad garden, where Medor was baying
the moon--through the silent avenue and park--through the deserted
streets of Passy--and on by desolate quays and bridges to dark quarters
of Paris; till I fell awake in my tracks and found that another dreary
and commonplace day had dawned over London--but no longer dreary and
commonplace for me, with such experiences to look back and forward
to--such a strange inheritance of wonder and delight!

I had a few more occasional failures, such as, for instance, when the
thread between my waking and sleeping life was snapped by a moment's
carelessness, or possibly by some movement of my body in bed, in which
case the vision would suddenly get blurred, the reality of it destroyed,
and an ordinary dream rise in its place. My immediate consciousness of
this was enough to wake me on the spot, and I would begin again, _da
capo_ till all went as I wished.

Evidently our brain contains something akin both to a photographic
plate and a phonographic cylinder, and many other things of the same
kind not yet discovered; not a sight or a sound or a smell is lost; not
a taste or a feeling or an emotion. Unconscious memory records them all,
without our even heeding what goes on around us beyond the things that
attract our immediate interest or attention.

Thus night after night I saw reacted before me scenes not only fairly
remembered, but scenes utterly forgotten, and yet as unmistakably true
as the remembered ones, and all bathed in that ineffable light, the
light of other days--the light that never was on sea or land, and yet
the light of absolute truth.

How it transcends in value as well as in beauty the garish light of