deep sleep when the
will-o'-the-wisps of waking and dreaming are banished, and that color
irradiates and fills its domain, and is just grazed by the abrupt ray
of suddenly awaking consciousness?

There it is once for all, and there is no escaping it! What is this
darkness? Is it a phantom and a weakness? Is it only an enemy who
challenges you and vanishes away in proportion as your own self
enlarges? Is it death slowly developing in you?

It is intolerable. If this pillow were saturated with mortal poison,
you would take the corner between your lips as the infant takes his
mother's breast, and would drink release from your troubles. But if the
poison stood over there in the other corner of the room, the mere ten
paces to reach it would carry you too far back into life again! And yet
tomorrow, or a few days hence, there will be moments when this darkness
will suddenly surge up in you and consume you as though it were fire,
so that you shrivel up within yourself and cannot excuse in your own
eyes the shame of living. Yes, even though you can calmly look back
upon this thing, smile at it like a reasonable man and joke about it,
even then there is a secret fibre in your being which yearns for that
darkness, which shudders in pride and awe of it, which has a
premonition that in it there is something purer than all light and all
joy.

In search of protection from such worrying phantasms I finally opened
my eyes and turned toward the open window. But what I saw outside was
so surprising that I closed my eyes again and cried, "What the devil is
that?"

Having recovered my composure and the consciousness that I had senses,
I opened my eyes once more and peered out: but on the ridge-pole of the
adjacent farm building, like doves on a German stable, there still sat
at regular intervals five vultures, immovable and waiting. As though
cut out of black paper, they seemed pasted on the gleaming blue morning
sky.

"Shameless fellows!" I ejaculated. "I must admit that I have been
philosophizing here to myself like a dead dog; but I am not yet ready
for you by a good deal!" They remained quietly sitting there.

[Illustration: BACK FROM THE FAIR]
Franz Wilhelm Voigt

Then I jumped out of bed, took an orange from the fruit plate on the
table, and threw it at the creatures. The orange flew neatly between
two of them; the vulture perched nearest to its path straightened up,
inquisitively turned his head with the greedy eyes to rig