less on the ground, I was turned over by
a foot. I was dragged by the neck into a corner. I heard men speak
together. I was turned over by other feet. I saw a figure like myself
lying dressed in my clothes on a bed. What might have been, for anything
I knew, a silence of days, weeks, months, years, was broken by a violent
wrestling of men all over the room. The figure like myself was assailed,
and my valise was in its hand. I was trodden upon and fallen over. I
heard a noise of blows, and thought it was a wood-cutter cutting down
a tree. I could not have said that my name was John Harmon--I could not
have thought it--I didn't know it--but when I heard the blows, I thought
of the wood-cutter and his axe, and had some dead idea that I was lying
in a forest.

'This is still correct? Still correct, with the exception that I cannot
possibly express it to myself without using the word I. But it was not
I. There was no such thing as I, within my knowledge.

'It was only after a downward slide through something like a tube, and
then a great noise and a sparkling and crackling as of fires, that the
consciousness came upon me, "This is John Harmon drowning! John Harmon,
struggle for your life. John Harmon, call on Heaven and save yourself!"
I think I cried it out aloud in a great agony, and then a heavy horrid
unintelligible something vanished, and it was I who was struggling there
alone in the water.

'I was very weak and faint, frightfully oppressed with drowsiness, and
driving fast with the tide. Looking over the black water, I saw the
lights racing past me on the two banks of the river, as if they were
eager to be gone and leave me dying in the dark. The tide was running
down, but I knew nothing of up or down then. When, guiding myself safely
with Heaven's assistance before the fierce set of the water, I at last
caught at a boat moored, one of a tier of boats at a causeway, I was
sucked under her, and came up, only just alive, on the other side.

'Was I long in the water? Long enough to be chilled to the heart, but
I don't know how long. Yet the cold was merciful, for it was the cold
night air and the rain that restored me from a swoon on the stones of
the causeway. They naturally supposed me to have toppled in, drunk, when
I crept to the public-house it belonged to; for I had no notion where
I was, and could not articulate--through the poison that had made me
insensible having affected my speech--and I supposed the night