d,
and though my body was dead and myself invisible but potent with hard
grasp of hand, and flight in air, and strength of foot, I walked on the
earth a thing that no God surely ever wished to make in his creation. I
was a man with all a man's forces and all a man's heat, but I was as air
to everything, and I held myself as I pleased. Soon I came to the old
hall, and entering through the great door--for doors were nothing to me,
yet I could open and shut them with my hands--I found the banqueting hall
most desolate and only some few seats now near the fire; and passing on
into the upper rooms I heard deep snoring coming from one of them, and
looking in, I saw a young man that I did not know, who lay and slept
beside a great wolf-dog. The wolf-dog turned and raised its head and
howled, and I crept down the stairs again and out and on.

So all that night I journeyed toward the shore, and as the morning broke
the far blue ice stretched before me and I travelled on. I travelled on
over the ice-cakes, shoving on with my rusty sword where water was; and
so from crack to crack and block to block, I crept until I was half-way
across; then I sat down and laughed and nearly fell back into the water,
for the ice-block tipped. I had forgotten that the air was mine, and
that as the birds, or as the winged men and women that the priests have
in pictures, I could go where I would; so I rose from the ice, and the
wind sang across my rusty sword-hilt, and the air was keen, so that I
opened wide my mouth and crossed the ice to land. So in three days I saw
a great smoke rising, and a low stone hill that lay between the last
snow and the bend of the sky. This I passed over in the night time, and
the lights shone there for miles from the city and then I went on
through the moonless night, until a great hall stood against the sea
there. This I knew was Elsinore, and so I stopped and rested in a pack
of straw that lay in a stable near the castle's rearward gate. The
tempest howled around me and the straw whistled as if for fear, but I
lay quiet, for all long cares had quite dropped away.

The next day and the next night too, I lay and rested there in a strange
content that hurt me sometimes when I felt it most; but on the third
night, having gained great strength, and ground my sword--when lights
gleamed down from the castle windows and Elsinore was gay for some
king's whim--I went across the moat and through the gates, and by the
side-door