r, as if seeking to grasp in empty space forms not seen of
any other eye, and all your words ended in sighs betokening some
mystery. Then your friends asked you, "What is the matter with you, my
dear friend? What do you see?" And, wishing to describe the inner
pictures in all their vivid colours, with their lights and their
shades, you in vain struggled to find words with which to express
yourself. But you felt as if you must gather up all the events that had
happened, wonderful, splendid, terrible, jocose, and awful, in the very
first word, so that the whole might be revealed by a single electric
discharge, so to speak. Yet every word and all that partook of the
nature of communication by intelligible sounds seemed to be
colourless, cold, and dead. Then you try and try again, and stutter and
stammer, whilst your friends' prosy questions strike like icy winds
upon your heart's hot fire until they extinguish it. But if, like a
bold painter, you had first sketched in a few audacious strokes the
outline of the picture you had in your soul, you would then easily have
been able to deepen and intensify the colours one after the other,
until the varied throng of living figures carried your friends away,
and they, like you, saw themselves in the midst of the scene that had
proceeded out of your own soul.

Strictly speaking, indulgent reader, I must indeed confess to you,
nobody has asked me for the history of young Nathanael; but you are
very well aware that I belong to that remarkable class of authors who,
when they are bearing anything about in their minds in the manner I
have just described, feel as if everybody who comes near them, and also
the whole world to boot, were asking, "Oh! what is it? Oh! do tell us,
my good sir?" Hence I was most powerfully impelled to narrate to you
Nathanael's ominous life. My soul was full of the elements of wonder
and extraordinary peculiarity in it; but, for this very reason, and
because it was necessary in the very beginning to dispose you,
indulgent reader, to bear with what is fantastic--and that is not a
little thing--I racked my brain to find a way of commencing the story
in a significant and original manner, calculated to arrest your
attention. To begin with "Once upon a time," the best beginning for a
story, seemed to me too tame; with "In the small country town S----
lived," rather better, at any rate allowing plenty of room to work up
to the climax; or to plunge at once _in medias r