eling the
same sensation in his boyhood, when he had walked one morning at sunrise
on a strange road, and had wondered what would happen when he turned a
long curve he was approaching. And it seemed to him now as then, that a
trackless, a virgin waste of experience surrounded him--that he was in
the midst of an incalculable vastness of wonder and delight. It was
a nuisance to have this web of flesh wrapping about him, binding his
limbs, hindering his efforts, stifling his breath.

And then, as in the brain of a fevered and delirious man, this
impression vanished as inexplicably as it had come. His ideas were
perfectly independent of his will. He could neither recover one that
he had lost nor summon a fresh one from the border of obscurity that
surrounded a centre of almost intolerable brightness into which his
mental images glided as into a brilliantly lighted chamber. Into this
brightness a troop of hallucinations darted suddenly like a motley and
ill-assorted company of players. He saw first a grotesque and indistinct
figure, which he discerned presently to be the goblin his nurse had used
to frighten him in his infancy; then the face of his uncle, the elder
Jonathan Gay, with his restless and suffering look; and after this the
face of Kesiah, wearing her deprecation expression, which said, "It
isn't really my fault that I couldn't change things"; and then the faces
of women he had seen but once, or passed in the street and remembered;
and in the midst of these crowding faces, the scarred and ravaged face
of an old crossing-sweeper on a windy corner in Paris. . . . "I wish
they'd leave me alone," he thought, with the helplessness of delirium,
"I wish they'd keep away and leave me alone." He wanted to drive these
hallucinations from his brain, and to recapture the exhilarating sense
of discovery he had lost the minute before, but because he sought it, in
some unimaginable way, it continued to elude him. The loud hum of bees
in the Indian summer confused him, and he thought impatiently that if
it would only cease for an instant, his mind might clear again, and he
might think things out--that he might even remember the important things
he had forgotten. "Abner Revercomb shot me," he said aloud. "I don't
know much. I don't know whether I am alive or dead. All I am certain of
is that it doesn't matter in the least--that it's too small a fact to
make any fuss about. It's all so small--the blamed thing isn't any more
importa