t of finding them. He wanted these
companions very badly indeed, but the struggling of his memory was
painful, and he could not keep the effort up for very long at one time.

The effort once relaxed, however, his thoughts wandered freely where
they would; and there rose before his mind's eye dim suggestions of
memories far more distant--ghostly scenes and faces that passed before
him in endless succession, but always faded away before he could
properly seize and name them.

This memory, so stubborn as regards quite recent events, began to play
strange tricks with him. It carried him away into a Past so remote that
he could not connect it with himself at all, and it was like dreaming of
scenes and events that had happened to some one else; yet, all the time,
he knew quite well those things had happened to him, and to none else.
It was the memory of the soul asserting itself now that the clamour of
the body was low. It was an underground river coming to the surface, for
odd minutes, here and there, showing its waters to the stars just long
enough to catch their ghostly reflections before it rolled away
underground again.

Yet, swift and transitory as they were, these glimpses brought in their
train sensations that were too powerful ever to have troubled his
child-mind in its present body. They stirred in him the strong emotions,
the ecstasies, the terrors, the yearnings of a much more distant past;
whispering to him, could he but have understood, of an infinitely deeper
layer of memories and experiences which, now released from the burden of
the immediate years, strove to awaken into life again. The soul in that
little body covered with alpaca knickerbockers and a sailor blouse
seemed suddenly to have access to a storehouse of knowledge that must
have taken centuries, rather than a few short years, to acquire.

It was all very queer. The feeling of tremendous age grew mysteriously
over him. He realised that he had been wandering for ages. He had been
to the stars and also to the deeps; he had roamed over strange mountains
far away from cities or inhabited places of the earth, and had lived by
streams whose waves were silvered by moonlight dropping softly through
whispering palm branches....

Some of these ghostly memories brought him sensations of keenest
happiness--icy, silver, radiant; others swept through his heart like a
cold wave, leaving behind a feeling of unutterable woe, and a sense of
loneliness that almost