ly he dragged him inside, threw him down, and held him.

The Rat struggled desperately for a few moments, and then his strength
seemed suddenly to leave him, and he lay still and exhausted, with
closed eyes, trembling. Presently the Mole assisted him to rise and
placed him in a chair, where he sat collapsed and shrunken into
himself, his body shaken by a violent shivering, passing in time into
an hysterical fit of dry sobbing. Mole made the door fast, threw the
satchel into a drawer and locked it, and sat down quietly on the table
by his friend, waiting for the strange seizure to pass. Gradually the
Rat sank into a troubled doze, broken by starts and confused
murmurings of things strange and wild and foreign to the unenlightened
Mole; and from that he passed into a deep slumber.

Very anxious in mind, the Mole left him for a time and busied himself
with household matters; and it was getting dark when he returned to
the parlour and found the Rat where he had left him, wide awake
indeed, but listless, silent, and dejected. He took one hasty glance
at his eyes; found them, to his great gratification, clear and dark
and brown again as before; and then sat down and tried to cheer him up
and help him to relate what had happened to him.

Poor Ratty did his best, by degrees, to explain things; but how could
he put into cold words what had mostly been suggestion? How recall,
for another's benefit, the haunting sea voices that had sung to him,
how reproduce at second-hand the magic of the Seafarer's hundred
reminiscences? Even to himself, now the spell was broken and the
glamour gone, he found it difficult to account for what had seemed,
some hours ago, the inevitable and only thing. It is not surprising,
then, that he failed to convey to the Mole any clear idea of what he
had been through that day.

To the Mole this much was plain: the fit, or attack, had passed away,
and had left him sane again, though shaken and cast down by the
reaction. But he seemed to have lost all interest for the time in the
things that went to make up his daily life, as well as in all pleasant
forecastings of the altered days and doings that the changing season
was surely bringing.

Casually, then, and with seeming indifference, the Mole turned his
talk to the harvest that was being gathered in, the towering wagons
and their straining teams, the growing ricks, and the large moon
rising over bare acres dotted with sheaves. He talked of the reddening