ething
of it in my practice--and had listened to the folk-lorist holding forth
like a man inspired upon ways and means of reaching concealed regions
of the human consciousness, and opening it to the knowledge of things
called magical, so that one became free of a larger universe. But it
was only now for the first time, on these bare hills, in touch with the
wind and the rain, that I realized in how simple a fashion the
frontiers of consciousness could shift this way and that, or with what
touch of genuine awe the certainty might come that one stood on the
borderland of new, untried, perhaps dangerous, experiences.

At any rate, it did now come to me that my consciousness had shifted
its frontiers very considerably, and that whatever might happen must
seem not abnormal, but quite simple and inevitable, and of course
utterly true. This very simplicity, however, doing no violence to my
being, brought with it none the less a sense of dread and discomfort;
and my dim awareness that unknown possibilities were about me in the
night puzzled and distressed me perhaps more than I cared to admit.

III

All this that takes so long to describe became apparent to me in a few
seconds. What I had always despised ascended the throne.

But with the finding of Bassett's cottage, as a sign-post close to
home, my former _sang-froid_, my stupidity, would doubtless return, and
my relief was therefore considerable when at length a faint gleam of
light appeared through the mist, against which the square dark shadow
of the chimney-line pointed upwards. After all, I had not strayed so
very far out of the way. Now I could definitely ascertain where I was
wrong.

Quickening my pace, I scrambled over a broken stone wall, and almost
ran across the open bit of grass to the door. One moment the black
outline of the cottage was there in front of me, and the next, when I
stood actually against it--there was nothing! I laughed to think how
utterly I had been deceived. Yet not utterly, for as I groped back
again over the wall, the cottage loomed up a little to the left, with
its windows lighted and friendly, and I had only been mistaken in my
angle of approach after all. Yet again, as I hurried to the door, the
mist drove past and thickened a second time--and the cottage was not
where I had seen it!

My confusion increased a lot after that. I scrambled about in all
directions, rather foolishly hurried, and over countless stone walls it
seemed, an