peering inland.

Back of the beach the land rose in long, sweeping hillocks, treeless but
green. His curiously befogged vision made out a number of shapes that
resembled dwellings.

"Go ... get ... help ..." he repeated thickly.

He started off with a brave, staggering rush that carried him a dozen
feet inland. Then his knees turned to water, and the blackness of night
shut down upon his senses.

XV

DISCLOSURES

Sleep is a potent medicine for the mind; but sometimes the potion is
compounded with somewhat too heavy a proportion of dreams and nonsense;
when it's apt to play curious tricks with returning consciousness. When
Whitaker awoke he was on the sands of Narragansett, and the afternoon
was cloudy-warm and bright, so that his eyes were grateful for the shade
of a white parasol that a girl he knew was holding over him; and his age
was eighteen and his cares they were none; and the girl was saying in a
lazy, laughing voice: "I love my love with a P because he's Perfectly
Pulchritudinous and Possesses the Power of Pleasing, and because he
Prattles Prettily and his socks are Peculiarly Purple--"

"And," the man who'd regained his youth put in, "his name is Peter and
he's Positively a Pest...."

But the voice in which he said this was quite out of the picture--less a
voice than a croak out of a throat kiln-dry and burning. So he grew
suspicious of his senses; and when the parasol was transformed into the
shape of a woman wearing a clumsy jacket of soiled covert-cloth over a
non-descript garment of weirdly printed calico--then he was sure that
something was wrong with him.

Besides, the woman who wasn't a parasol suddenly turned and bent over
him an anxious face, exclaiming in accents of consternation: "O dear! If
he's delirious--!"

His voice, when he strove to answer, rustled and rattled rather than
enunciated, surprising him so that he barely managed to say: "What
nonsense! I'm just thirsty!" Then the circuit of returning consciousness
closed and his lost youth slipped forever from his grasp.

"I thought you would be," said the woman, calmly; "so I brought water.
Here...."

She offered a tin vessel to his lips, as he lay supine, spilling a
quantity of its contents on his face and neck and a very little into his
mouth, if enough to make him choke and splutter. He sat up suddenly,
seized the vessel--a two-quart milk-pail--and buried his face in it,
gradually tilting it, while its cool, delicious