start: on the same night I had myself
dreamed the same thing; but not a word said I about it now. There was a
stammer in my tongue when I answered:

'Who? I?--on the expedition?--I would not go, if I were asked.'

'Oh, you would.'

'I wouldn't. You forget that I am about to be married.'

'Well, we need not discuss the point, as Peters is not going to die,'
said he. 'Still, if anything did happen to him, you know, it is you I
should come straight to, Adam Jeffson.'

'Clark, you jest,' I said: 'I know really very little of astronomy, or
magnetic phenomena. Besides, I am about to be married....'

'But what about your botany, my friend? _There's_ what we should be
wanting from you: and as for nautical astronomy, poh, a man with your
scientific habit would pick all that up in no time.'

'You discuss the matter as gravely as though it were a possibility,
Clark,' I said, smiling. 'Such a thought would never enter my head:
there is, first of all, my _fiancee_----'

'Ah, the all-important Countess, eh?--Well, but she, as far as I know
the lady, would be the first to force you to go. The chance of stamping
one's foot on the North Pole does not occur to a man every day, my son.'

'Do talk of something else!' I said. 'There is Peters....'

'Well, of course, there is Peters. But believe me, the dream I had was
so clear----'

'Let me alone with your dreams, and your Poles!' I laughed.

Yes, I remember: I pretended to laugh loud! But my secret heart knew,
even _then_, that one of those crises was occurring in my life which,
from my youth, has made it the most extraordinary which any creature of
earth ever lived. And I knew that this was so, firstly, because of the
two dreams, and secondly, because, when Clark was gone, and I was
drawing on my gloves to go to see my _fiancee_, I heard distinctly the
old two Voices talk within me: and One said: 'Go not to see her now!'
and the Other: 'Yes, go, go!'

The two Voices of my life! An ordinary person reading my words would
undoubtedly imagine that I mean only two ordinary contradictory
impulses--or else that I rave: for what modern man could comprehend how
real-seeming were those voices, how loud, and how, ever and again, I
heard them contend within me, with a nearness 'nearer than breathing,'
as it says in the poem, and 'closer than hands and feet.'

About the age of seven it happened first to me. I was playing one summer
evening in a pine-wood of my father's; half a mile aw