ough me, and a calm, intense, ineffable joy followed in
their train. I had a glimpse.... And my eyes were not dazzled. I yearned
and strained towards what I saw, towards the exceeding brightness of
undreamt companionships, hopes, perceptions, activities, and sorrows.
Yes, sorrows! But what noble sorrows they were that I felt awaited me
there! I strained at my mysterious bonds. It seemed that they were about
to break and that I should be winged away into other dimensions....

And then, I knew that they were tightening again, and the brightness
very slowly faded, and I lost faith in the gift of vision which
momentarily had enabled me to see the illusions and the littleness of
the world. And I was slowly, slowly drawn away from the window.... And
then I felt heavy weights on my eyes, and I could not move my jaw. I
shuddered convulsively, and a coin struck the floor and ran till it fell
flat. And the door swiftly opened....

V

Yes, my whole character is changed, within; though externally it may
seem the same. Externally I may seem to have resumed the affections and
the interests which occupied me before my illness and my remarkable
recovery. Yet I am different. Certainly I have lost again the strange
transcendental knowledge which was mine for a few instants. Certainly I
have descended again to the earthly level. All those magic things have
slipped away, except hope. In a sure hope, in a positive faith, I am
waiting. I am waiting for all that magic to happen to me again. I know
that the pain of loneliness, when again I shall see my own body from the
outside, will be exquisite, but--the reward! The reward! That is what is
always at the back of my mind, the source of the calm joy in which I
wait. Externally I am the successful earthenware manufacturer, happily
married, getting rich on a china-firing oven, employing a couple of
hundred workmen, etcetera, who was once given up for dead. But I am more
than that. I have seen God.

JOCK-AT-A-VENTURE

I

All this happened at a Martinmas Fair in Bursley, long ago in the
fifties, when everybody throughout the Five Towns pronounced Bursley
"Bosley" as a matter of course; in the tedious and tragic old times,
before it had been discovered that hell was a myth, and before the
invention of pleasure or even of half-holidays. Martinmas was in those
days a very important moment in the annual life of the town, for it was
at Martinmas that potters' wages were fixed for