WHILE the church bells were ringing daily in the tower above his head, and the old Bridford chimes, famous long ago, were heralding the birth of every hour with a fine old psalm tune that pealed out over the busy, money-making city, like an echo of the past, Cyril Culverhouse was lying at the bottom of a dark gulf of pain and confusion, and all the outer world, and all the life that he had lived, were cancelled and forgotten. Strange images danced before his eyes like motes in the sunshine, yet seemed to him neither strange nor unexpected. He had a history of his own in that period of delirium, a new identity, new surroundings, a mad, wild world, peopled out of his own brain. Bishops and archbishops came and sat beside his bed, and held long arguments with him, figments of a mind distraught, the shadows that haunt fever-dreams, but to him intensely real. The dead came back to life to hold converse with him, and he was not surprised. No, he had always thought there was something in the ideas of the old necromancers. The elixir of life was not an impossibility. Here was Luther with his square solid face, and sensual humorous mouth. Here was Pascal, full of quaint sayings and far-reaching thoughts. The sick man talked for all of them. His talk was wildest raving to the ears that listened, but to his own fancy it was profoundest wisdom. There is no egotism, no belief in self, equal to that of the lunatic. For him the stars and moon have been made, for him God willingly performs miracles which overthrow all the laws of the universe. He is the axis of the world, and lets it go round. How long those days and nights of fever were! That was the chief agony of them. The eternity of hours, so thickly peopled with distorted shapes that every quarter of an hour was an era. Of actual physical pain the sufferer had no consciousness; but weariness, almost too heavy to be borne weighed upon him in the long strange nights, when the faces of his watchers changed, and the very walls of his room seemed new and unknown to him. He fancied that his nurses had removed him into new lodgings while he slept, though it seemed to him that he had never slept. Sometimes he fancied himself in one place, sometimes in another. He was at Oxford, in those old rooms of his looking into the college garden. He was at Little Yafford, at Culverhouse, anywhere but where he really was. And his nurses, who were they? He faintly remembered Mrs. Podmore leaning over his bed, fat and scant of breath, with a medicine-glass in her hand, coaxing him to drink. He remembered Sarah, making believe to step softly, in creaking shoes, whose every movement was agony to him. But these things were lost in the darkness of remote ages. His present nurses seemed to have been tending him during a century.