a horrible skill
besides.

Shorthouse meanwhile talked without ceasing. The great quantity of hay
opposite--or straw, I believe it actually was--seemed to deaden the
sound of his voice, but the silence, too, had become so oppressive that
I welcomed his torrent and even dreaded the moment when it would stop. I
heard, too, the gentle ticking of my watch. Each second uttered its
voice and dropped away into a gulf, as if starting on a journey whence
there was no return. Once a dog barked somewhere in the distance,
probably on the Lower Farm; and once an owl hooted close outside and I
could hear the swishing of its wings as it passed overhead. Above me, in
the darkness, I could just make out the outline of the barn, sinister
and black, the rows of rafters stretching across from wall to wall like
wicked arms that pressed upon the hay. Shorthouse, deep in some involved
yarn of the South Seas that was meant to be full of cheer and sunshine,
and yet only succeeded in making a ghastly mixture of unnatural
colouring, seemed to care little whether I listened or not. He made no
appeal to me, and I made one or two quite irrelevant remarks which
passed him by and proved that he was merely uttering sounds. He, too,
was afraid of the silence.

I fell to wondering how long a man could talk without stopping. . . . Then
it seemed to me that these words of his went falling into the same gulf
where the seconds dropped, only they were heavier and fell faster. I
began to chase them. Presently one of them fell much faster than the
rest, and I pursued it and found myself almost immediately in a land of
clouds and shadows. They rose up and enveloped me, pressing on the
eyelids. . . . It must have been just here that I actually fell asleep,
somewhere between twelve and one o'clock, because, as I chased this word
at tremendous speed through space, I knew that I had left the other
words far, very far behind me, till, at last, I could no longer hear
them at all. The voice of the story-teller was beyond the reach of
hearing; and I was falling with ever increasing rapidity through an
immense void.

A sound of whispering roused me. Two persons were talking under their
breath close beside me. The words in the main escaped me, but I caught
every now and then bitten-off phrases and half sentences, to which,
however, I could attach no intelligible meaning. The words were quite
close--at my very side in fact--and one of the voices sounded so
familiar, t