tators. But the anger you always
experienced may have clouded your faculties for the time being. Have you
inquired of anybody else who was present on these occasions?"

I replied that I had not. I had shrunk from being identified in any way
with Barber. I had to think of my wife and children. I could not afford
to lose my post.

"No," rejoined Mr. G.M., "I can quite understand that. I should probably
have acted myself as you did. Still, the effect his performances have
had on you, and apparently on others, is the strangest element in
Barber's case. Otherwise, I don't see that it offers anything
inexplicable. You say that Barber acts against his will--against his
better judgment. We all do that. All men and women who look back over
their lives must perceive the number of things they have done which they
had no intention of doing. We obey some secret command; we sail under
sealed orders. We pass by without noticing it some tiny fact which,
years later, perhaps, influences the rest of our lives. And for all our
thinking, we seldom can trace this tiny fact. I myself cannot tell to
this day why I did not become a Baptist minister. It seems to me I
always intended to do this, but one fine afternoon I found I had ended
my first day's work in a house of business.

"Much of our life is unconscious; even the most wide-awake of us pass
much of our lives in dreams. Several hours out of every twenty-four we
pass in a dream state we cannot help carrying some of those happy or
sinister adventures into our waking hours. It is really as much our
habit to dream as to be awake. Perhaps we are always dreaming. Haven't
you ever for a moment, under some powerful exterior shock, become half
conscious that you should be doing something else from what you are
actually doing? But with us this does not last; and as life goes on such
intimations become dimmer and dimmer. With subjects like Barber, on the
other hand, the intimations become stronger and stronger, till at last
they attempt to carry their dreams into action. That is the way I
explain this case."

"Perhaps you are right."

The house where Barber was lodging stood high up on the side of a hill.
We reached it after a rather breathless climb in the rain. It was a
shepherd's cottage, standing quite lonely. Far down below the village
could be seen with the smoke above the red roofs.

The woman told us that Barber was in, but she thought he might be
asleep. He slept a lot.

"I don't