emed to deepen as we waited.

There is a point, in temperature, that seems the utter limit of cold.
Mushers along certain trails in the North had known that point--when
there seems simply no heat left in the bitter, crackling, biting air.
The temperature, at such times, registers forty--fifty--sixty below. Yet
the scientist, in his laboratory, with his liquid hydrogen vaporizing in
a vacuum, can show that this temperature is not the beginning of the
fearful scale of cold. To-night it was the same way with the silence.
There simply seemed no sound left. But as we waited the silence grew and
swelled until the brain ceased to believe the senses and the image of
reality was gone. It gave you the impression of being fast asleep and
in a dream that might easily turn to death.

The mind kept dwelling on death. It was a great deal more plausible than
life. The image of life was gone from that bleak manor house by the
sea--the sea was dead, the air, all the elements by which men view their
lives. The forest, lost in its silence, its most whispered voices
stilled, was a dead forest, incomprehensible as living.

I went upstairs soon after. I thought it might be cooler there.
Sometimes, if you go a few feet off the ground, you find it XXXX
cooler--quite in opposition to the fact that hot air rises. There was no
appreciable difference, however; but here, at least, I could take off my
outer clothes. Then I got into a dressing-gown and slippers and waited,
with a breathlessness and impatience not quite healthy and normal, for
the late night sea breeze to spring up.

Seemingly it had been delayed. The hour was past eleven, the sweltering
heat still remained. There was no way under Heaven to pass the time. One
couldn't read, for the reason that the mental effort of following the
lines of type was incomprehensibly fatiguing. I had neither the energy
nor the interest to work upon the cryptogram--that baffling column of
four-lettered words. Yet the brain was inordinately active. Ungoverned
thought swept through it in ordered trains, in sudden, lunging waves,
and in swirling eddies. Yet the thoughts were not clean-cut, wholly
true--they overlapped with the bizarre and elfin impulses of the fancy,
and the fine edge of discrimination between reality and dreams was some
way dulled. It wasn't easy to hold the brain in perfect bondage.

To that fact alone I try to ascribe the curious flood of thoughts that
swept me in those midnight hours. E