gan to look upon me queerly. Also,
he gave amazing garblings of my tales to our playmates, until all began
to look upon me queerly.

It was a bitter experience, but I learned my lesson. I was different
from my kind. I was abnormal with something they could not understand,
and the telling of which would cause only misunderstanding. When the
stories of ghosts and goblins went around, I kept quiet. I smiled grimly
to myself. I thought of my nights of fear, and knew that mine were the
real things--real as life itself, not attenuated vapors and surmised
shadows.

For me no terrors resided in the thought of bugaboos and wicked ogres.
The fall through leafy branches and the dizzy heights; the snakes that
struck at me as I dodged and leaped away in chattering flight; the wild
dogs that hunted me across the open spaces to the timber--these were
terrors concrete and actual, happenings and not imaginings, things of
the living flesh and of sweat and blood. Ogres and bugaboos and I had
been happy bed-fellows, compared with these terrors that made their bed
with me throughout my childhood, and that still bed with me, now, as I
write this, full of years.

CHAPTER II

I have said that in my dreams I never saw a human being. Of this fact I
became aware very early, and felt poignantly the lack of my own kind. As
a very little child, even, I had a feeling, in the midst of the horror
of my dreaming, that if I could find but one man, only one human, I
should be saved from my dreaming, that I should be surrounded no more
by haunting terrors. This thought obsessed me every night of my life for
years--if only I could find that one human and be saved!

I must iterate that I had this thought in the midst of my dreaming,
and I take it as an evidence of the merging of my two personalities, as
evidence of a point of contact between the two disassociated parts of
me. My dream personality lived in the long ago, before ever man, as we
know him, came to be; and my other and wake-a-day personality projected
itself, to the extent of the knowledge of man's existence, into the
substance of my dreams.

Perhaps the psychologists of the book will find fault with my way of
using the phrase, "disassociation of personality." I know their use
of it, yet am compelled to use it in my own way in default of a better
phrase. I take shelter behind the inadequacy of the English language.
And now to the explanation of my use, or misuse, of the phrase.

I