, dark, gloomy aisles, lined with stupendous pines and carpeted with
long, luxuriant grass, gigantic ferns, and other monstrous primeval
flora, of a nomenclature wholly unknown to me; I have watched in chilled
fascination the black trunks twist and bend and contort, as if under the
influence of an uncontrollable fit of laughter, or at the bidding of
some psychic cyclone. I have at times stayed my steps when in the throes
of the city-pavements; shops and people have been obliterated, and their
places taken by occult foliage; immense fungi have blocked out the sun's
rays, and under the shelter of their slimy, glistening heads, I have
been thrilled to see the wriggling, gliding forms of countless smaller
saprophytes. I have felt the cold touch of loathsome toadstools and
sniffed the hot, dry dust of the full, ripe puff-ball. On the Thames
Embankment, up Chelsea way, I have at twilight beheld wonderful
metamorphoses. In company with the shadows of natural objects of the
landscape, have silently sprung up giant reeds and bullrushes. I have
felt their icy coldness as, blowing hither and thither in the delirium
of their free, untrammelled existence, they have swished across my face.
Visions, truly visions, the exquisite fantasies of a vivid imagination.
So says the sage. I do not think so; I dispute him _in toto_. These
objects I have seen have not been illusions; else, why have I not
imagined other things; why, for example, have I not seen rocks walking
about and tables coming in at my door? If these phantasms were but
tricks of the imagination, then imagination would stop at nothing. But
they are not imagination, neither are they the idle fancies of an
over-active brain. They are objective--just as much objective as are the
smells of recognised physical objects, that those, with keenly sensitive
olfactory organs, can detect, and those, with a less sensitive sense of
smell, cannot detect; those, with acute hearing, can hear, and those
with less acute hearing cannot hear. And yet, people are slow to believe
that the seeing of the occult is as much a faculty as is the scenting of
smells or the hearing of noises.

I have heard it said that, deep down in coal mines, certain of the
workers have seen wondrous sights; that when they have been alone in a
drift, they have heard the blowing of the wind and the rustling of
leaves, and suddenly found themselves penned in on all sides by the
naked trunks of enormous primitive trees, lepido