instrument, the little
self-possession that I had left forsook me. I gazed around me
bewildered.

In like manner everything was changed. In the place of that old haftless
dagger, connected with so many historic associations personal to myself,
I beheld a Turkish yataghan dangling by its belt of crimson silk, while
the jewels in the hilt blazed as the lamplight played upon them. In the
spot where hung my cherished smoking cap, memorial of a buried love, a
knightly casque was suspended on the crest of which a golden dragon
stood in the act of springing. That strange lithograph of Calame was no
longer a lithograph, but it seemed to me that the portion of the wall
which it covered, of the exact shape and size, had been cut out, and, in
place of the picture, a _real_ scene on the same scale, and with real
actors, was distinctly visible. The old oak was there, and the stormy
sky was there; but I saw the branches of the oak sway with the tempest,
and the clouds drive before the wind. The wanderer in his cloak was
gone; but in his place I beheld a circle of wild figures, men and women,
dancing with linked hands around the hole of the great tree, chanting
some wild fragment of a song, to which the winds roared an unearthly
chorus. The snow-shoes, too, on whose sinewy woof I had sped for many
days amidst Canadian wastes, had vanished, and in their place lay a pair
of strange up-curled Turkish slippers, that had, perhaps, been many a
time shuffled off at the doors of mosques, beneath the steady blaze of
an orient sun.

All was changed. Wherever my eyes turned they missed familiar objects,
yet encountered strange representatives. Still, in all the substitutes
there seemed to me a reminiscence of what they replaced. They seemed
only for a time transmuted into other shapes, and there lingered around
them the atmosphere of what they once had been. Thus I could have sworn
the room to have been mine, yet there was nothing in it that I could
rightly claim. Everything reminded me of some former possession that it
was not. I looked for the acacia at the window, and lo! long silken
palm-leaves swayed in through the open lattice; yet they had the same
motion and the same air of my favourite tree, and seemed to murmur to
me, "Though we seem to be palm-leaves, yet are we acacia-leaves; yea,
those very ones on which you used to watch the butterflies alight and
the rain patter while you smoked and dreamed!" So in all things; the
room was, yet