haunting, beloved face, with its ineffable smile,
still printed on the retina of my closed eyes, I fell asleep.

And then I dreamed a dream, and the first phase of my real, inner life
began!

All the events of the day, distorted and exaggerated and jumbled
together after the usual manner of dreams, wove themselves into a kind
of nightmare and oppression. I was on my way to my old abode;
everything that I met or saw was grotesque and impossible, yet had now
the strange, vague charm of association and reminiscence, now the
distressing sense of change and desolation.

As I got near to the avenue gate, instead of the school on my left
there was a prison; and at the door a little thick-set jailer, three
feet high and much deformed, and a little deformed jaileress no bigger
than himself, were cunningly watching me out of the corners of their
eyes, and toothlessly smiling. Presently they began to waltz together
to an old familiar tune, with their enormous keys dangling at their
sides; and they looked so funny that I laughed and applauded. But soon
I perceived that their crooked faces were not really funny; indeed,
they were fatal and terrible in the extreme, and I was soon conscious
that these deadly dwarfs were trying to waltz between me and the
avenue gate for which I was bound--to cut me off, that they might run
me into the prison, where it was their custom to hang people of a
Monday morning.

In an agony of terror I made a rush for the avenue gate, and there
stood the Duchess of Towers, with mild surprise in her eyes and a kind
smile--a heavenly vision of strength and reality.

"You are not dreaming true!" she said. "Don't be afraid--those little
people don't exist! Give me your hand and come in here."

And as I did so she waved the troglodytes away, and they vanished; and
I felt that this was no longer a dream, but something else--some
strange thing that had happened to me, some new life that I had woke
up to.

For at the touch of her hand my consciousness, my sense of being I,
myself, which hitherto in my dream (as in all previous dreams up to
then) had been only partial, intermittent, and vague, suddenly blazed
into full, consistent, practical activity--just as it is in life, when
one is well awake and much interested in what is going on; only with
perceptions far keener and more alert.

I knew perfectly who I was and what I was, and remembered all the
events of the previous day. I was conscious that my real