he lay, and
they could not even tell how much he understood, for he was past the
effort that communicating with them would have meant; but all the while
he was feeling his brain was clearer than it had ever been in his life,
that at last he knew many things he could have told them if he could
have spoken, only they were things that cannot be taught by one man
to another, for every man must find them for himself.

At first it seemed to him he was floating very peacefully on a clear
sea, untroubled in mind or body, though seeing he was drifting, because
he was also aware that whither he was drifting was the inevitable
direction of a kindly current. Then after a little or long while, he
could not have told which, he seemed himself to become stationary, while
past him flowed the pattern of his life as he remembered it--scenes grey
and many-coloured, blurred at the edges, but sharp with an aching
clarity at the core. They had all gone, these happenings, but it was not
that which gave the poignancy; it was that the Ishmael who had taken
part in them was gone too, and each had borne something of himself away
with it.

Those first childish years after he had known Cloom was to be his, that
he had to regenerate it; then those years at St. Renny ... Killigrew
floated past him, joyous and pagan. There was Hilaria, joyous also ... he
had forgotten her for years now. At St. Renny life was always just
ahead, and he only had the sense of preparing for it, of being ready to
leap into it as into some golden cool stream of running waters.... In
those days it had been Cloom, the place made for him in life, that had
held so much of glamour in its grey walls and hard acres. Yet even then
there had been something else, some recognition of the fact that even
this was not an end to itself alone.... Then youth--the first years at
Cloom and that wonderful incursion into the London that was as past as
he was, that London that had been half-wonder, half-nightmare, and that
had held his love for Blanche. There had been a brief spell when he had
told himself that this was the chief thing, that in that passionate
fusing of two spirits, that absorption in some one other loved being,
lay the end in life, but the mirage had dissolved then even as the image
of it wavered and faded now. While he was lost and groping in the wastes
it had left him in, there swam up the memory of Hilaria again, but no
horror went with it. And though this second impinging of