g hours is the memory one would have of nightmare. Many events
are focussed sharply on my brain, but between these indelible pictures
I retain are intervals of unconsciousness. What occurred in those
intervals I know not, and never shall know.

I remember stumbling at the corner over the legs of a man. It was the
poor hunted wretch that had dragged himself past my hiding-place. How
distinctly do I remember his poor, pitiful, gnarled hands as he lay
there on the pavement--hands that were more hoof and claw than hands,
all twisted and distorted by the toil of all his days, with on the palms
a horny growth of callous a half inch thick. And as I picked myself
up and started on, I looked into the face of the thing and saw that it
still lived; for the eyes, dimly intelligent, were looking at me and
seeing me.

After that came a kindly blank. I knew nothing, saw nothing, merely
tottered on in my quest for safety. My next nightmare vision was a
quiet street of the dead. I came upon it abruptly, as a wanderer in the
country would come upon a flowing stream. Only this stream I gazed upon
did not flow. It was congealed in death. From pavement to pavement, and
covering the sidewalks, it lay there, spread out quite evenly, with
only here and there a lump or mound of bodies to break the surface. Poor
driven people of the abyss, hunted helots--they lay there as the rabbits
in California after a drive.* Up the street and down I looked. There was
no movement, no sound. The quiet buildings looked down upon the scene
from their many windows. And once, and once only, I saw an arm that
moved in that dead stream. I swear I saw it move, with a strange
writhing gesture of agony, and with it lifted a head, gory with nameless
horror, that gibbered at me and then lay down again and moved no more.

* In those days, so sparsely populated was the land that
wild animals often became pests. In California the custom
of rabbit-driving obtained. On a given day all the farmers
in a locality would assemble and sweep across the country in
converging lines, driving the rabbits by scores of thousands
into a prepared enclosure, where they were clubbed to death
by men and boys.

I remember another street, with quiet buildings on either side, and the
panic that smote me into consciousness as again I saw the people of the
abyss, but this time in a stream that flowed and came on. And then I saw
there was nothing to fear. Th