the extraordinary foolishness of
the old life. The ludicrous side of human wealth and importance
turned itself upon me, a shining novelty, poured down upon me like
the sunrise, and engulfed me in laughter. Swindells! Swindells,
damned! My vision of Judgment became a delightful burlesque. I saw
the chuckling Angel sayer with his face veiled, and the corporeal
presence of Swindells upheld amidst the laughter of the spheres.
"Here's a thing, and a very pretty thing, and what's to be done with
this very pretty thing?" I saw a soul being drawn from a rotund,
substantial-looking body like a whelk from its shell. . . .

I laughed loudly and long. And behold! even as I laughed the keen
point of things accomplished stabbed my mirth, and I was weeping,
weeping aloud, convulsed with weeping, and the tears were pouring
down my face.

Section 3

Everywhere the awakening came with the sunrise. We awakened to the
gladness of the morning; we walked dazzled in a light that was joy.
Everywhere that was so. It was always morning. It was morning
because, until the direct rays of the sun touched it, the changing
nitrogen of our atmosphere did not pass into its permanent phase,
and the sleepers lay as they had fallen. In its intermediate
state the air hung inert, incapable of producing either revival or
stupefaction, no longer green, but not yet changed to the
gas that now lives in us. . . .

To every one, I think, came some parallel to the mental states I
have already sought to describe--a wonder, an impression of joyful
novelty. There was also very commonly a certain confusion of the
intelligence, a difficulty in self-recognition. I remember clearly
as I sat on my stile that presently I had the clearest doubts of
my own identity and fell into the oddest metaphysical questionings.
"If this be I," I said, "then how is it I am no longer madly seeking
Nettie? Nettie is now the remotest thing--and all my wrongs. Why
have I suddenly passed out of all that passion? Why does
not the thought of Verrall quicken my pulses?" . . .

I was only one of many millions who that morning had the same doubts. I
suppose one knows one's self for one's self when one returns from
sleep or insensibility by the familiarity of one's bodily sensations,
and that morning all our most intimate bodily sensations were
changed. The intimate chemical processes of life were changed, its
nervous metaboly. For the fluctuating, uncertain, passion-darkened
thought and