gained my mind again. Between my
old emotions and any attempt to put them into words, or even to remember
them, lies always that insurmountable wall of my Change. I cannot
understand what I must have felt, I cannot express it.

I only know that for weeks I was sunk in a misery beyond any misery I
had ever imagined before. The only two friends I had on earth were gone
to me. I was left alone. And, for the first time, I began to see before
me all these endless years that would be the same, dull, lonely.

Yet I recovered. I could feel each day the growth of a strange new vigor
in my limbs, a vast force that was something tangibly expressive to
eternal life. Slowly my anguish began to die. After a week more, I began
to understand how my emotions were leaving me, how love and beauty and
everything of which poetry was made--how all this was going. I could not
bear the thought at first. I would look at the golden sunlight and the
blue shadow of the wind, and I would say,

"God! How beautiful!" And the words would echo meaninglessly in my ears.
Or I would remember Alice's face, that face I had once loved so
inextinguishably, and I would weep and clutch my forehead, and clench my
fists, crying,

"O God, how can I live without her!" Yet there would be a little strange
fancy in my head at the same moment, saying,

"Who is this Alice? You know no such person." And truly I would wonder
whether she had ever existed.

So, slowly, the old emotions were shed away from me, and I began to joy
in a corresponding growth of my mental perceptions. I began to toy idly
with mathematical formulae I had forgotten years ago, in the same
fashion that a poet toys with a word and its shades of meaning. I would
look at everything with new, seeing eyes, new perception, and I would
understand things I had never understood before, because formerly my
emotions had always occupied me more than my thoughts.

And so the weeks went by, until, one day, I was well.

... What, after all, is the use of this chronicle? Surely there will
never be men to read it. I have heard them say that the snow will never
go. I will be buried, it will be buried with me; and it will be the end
of us both. Yet, somehow, it eases my weary soul a little to write....

Need I say that I lived, thereafter, many thousands of thousands of
years, until this day? I cannot detail that life. It is a long round of
new, fantastic impressions, coming dream-like, one after another,
mel