lf had contemplated the past from the heights of new
birth, calmly conscious of the fact that this past belonged to a man who
was dead. The more he examined this past the more he loathed the man to
whom it had belonged, but the difference between that man and himself was
so profound that he felt, rightly, that he was not _He_.

Three mornings ago Berselius, who rarely dreamt, had awakened from a long
night of hunting in Dreamland. In Dreamland he had cast off his new
personality and became his old self, and then, in his hunting shirt and
with a cordite rifle in his hand, accompanied by the Zappo Zap, he had
tracked elephant herds across illimitable plains.

He had awakened to his new self again with the full recognition in his
mind that only a few moments ago he had been thinking with that other
man's brain, acting under his passions, living his life.

The Berselius of Dreamland had not the remotest connection with, or
knowledge of, the Berselius of real life. Yet the Berselius of real life
was very intimately connected with the Berselius of Dreamland, knew all
his actions, knew all his sensations, and remembered them to the minutest
detail.

The next night he did not dream at all--not so on the third night, when
the scene of horror by the Silent Pools was reenacted, himself in the
original _role_. The incidents were not quite the same, for scenes from
real life are scarcely ever reproduced on the stage of Dreamland in their
entirety; but they were ghastly enough in all conscience, and Berselius,
awake and wiping the sweat from his brow, saw them clearly before him and
remembered the callousness with which he had watched them but a few
moments ago.

No man can command his dreams; the dreaming man lives in a world beyond
law, and it came as a shock to Berselius that his old self should be alive
in him like this, powerful, active, and beyond rebuke.

Physically, he was a wreck of his old self, but that was nothing to the
fact which was now borne in on him--the fact that this new mentality was
but a thin shell covering the old, as the thin shell of earth, with its
flowers and pleasant landscapes, covers the burning hell which is the
earth's core.

The thing was perfectly natural. A great and vivid personality, and forty
years of exuberant and self-willed life had at a stroke been checked and
changed. The crust of his mind had cooled; tempestuous passions had passed
from the surface, giving place to kindlier emotions