AKENING

I have still sharp memories of the tortures of that illness, though it
befell so long ago. At times, when my mind was gone from me, I cried out
I know not what of jargon, of sentiment, of the horrors I had beheld in
my life. I lived again the pleasant scenes, warped and burlesqued almost
beyond cognizance, and the tragedies were magnified a hundred fold. Thus
it would be: on the low, white ceiling five cracks came together, and
that was a device. And the device would take on color, red-bronze like
the sumach in the autumn and streaks of vermilion, and two glowing coals
that were eyes, and above them eagles' feathers, and the cracks became
bramble bushes. I was behind the log, and at times I started and knew
that it was a hideous dream, and again Polly Ann was clutching me and
praying me to hold back, and I broke from her and splashed over the
slippery limestone bed of the creek to fight single-handed. Through all
the fearful struggle I heard her calling me piteously to come back to
her. When the brute got me under water I could not hear her, but her
voice came back suddenly (as when a door opens) and it was like the wind
singing in the poplars. Was it Polly Ann's voice?

Again, I sat with Nick under the trees on the lawn at Temple Bow, and the
world was dark with the coming storm. I knew and he knew that the storm
was brewing that I might be thrust out into it. And then in the
blackness, when the air was filled with all the fair things of the earth
torn asunder, a beautiful woman came through the noise and the fury, and
we ran to her and clung to her skirts, thinking we had found safety.
But she thrust us forth into the blackness with a smile, as though she
were flinging papers out of the window. She, too, grew out of the design
in the cracks of the ceiling, and a greater fear seized me at sight of
her features than when the red face came out of the brambles.

My constant torment was thirst. I was in the prairie, and it was
scorched and brown to the horizon. I searched and prayed pitifully for
water,--for only a sip of the brown water with the specks in it that was
in the swamp. There were no swamps. I was on the bed in the cabin
looking at the shifts and hunting shirts on the pegs, and Polly Ann would
bring a gourdful of clear water from the spring as far as the door. Nay,
once I got it to my lips, and it was gone. Sometimes a young man in a
hunting shirt, square-shouldered, clear-eyed, his face tanned and hi