nt, that would silence the rushing
sound of the river about him. But in spite of his struggles, this
current--which seemed sometimes to flow from a wound in his side,
and sometimes to be only the watery rustle of the aspens in the
graveyard--this imaginary yet pitiless current, bore him always farther
away from the thing to which he was clinging--from this thing he
could not let go because it was himself--because it had separated and
distinguished him from all other persons and objects in the universe.
"I've always believed I was one person," he thought, "but I am a
multitude. There are at least a million of me--and any one of them
might have crowded out all the others if he'd got a chance." A swift and
joyous surprise held him for a moment, as though he were conscious for
the first time of dormant possibilities in himself which he had never
suspected. "Why didn't I know this before?" he asked, like one who
stumbles by accident upon some simple and yet illuminating fact of
nature. "All this has been in me all the time, but nobody told me. I
might just as well have been any of these other selves as the one I
am." The noise of the river began in his head again, but it no longer
frightened him.

"It's only the hum of bees in the meadow," he said after a minute, "and
yet it fills the universe as if it were the sound of a battle. And now
I've forgotten what I was thinking about. It was very important, but
I shall never remember it." He closed his eyes, while the ghostly
fragrance of the life-everlasting on which he was lying rose in a cloud
to envelop him. Something brushed his face like the touch of wings,
and looking up he saw that it was a golden leaf which had fallen from a
bough of the great poplar above him. He had never seen anything in his
life so bright as that golden bough that hung over him, and when
he gazed through it, he saw that the sky was bluer than he had ever
imagined that it could be, and that everything at which he looked
had not only this quality of intense, of penetrating brightness, but
appeared transparent, with a luminous transparency which seemed a veil
spread over something that was shining beyond it. "I wonder if I'm
dead?" he thought irritably, "or is it only delirium? And if I am dead,
it really doesn't matter--an idiot could see through anything so thin as
this."

Again the cloud closed over him, and again just as suddenly it lifted
and the joyous surprise awoke in his mind. He remembered fe