would most probably have run all the way in spite of the sultriness of the air,--but he restrained this impulse, and walked leisurely on purpose, reproaching himself as he went along for the utter absurdity of his expectations. "Was ever madman more mad than I!" he murmured with some self-contempt--"What logical human being in his right mind would be guilty of such egregious folly! But am I logical? Certainly not! Am I in my right mind? I think I am,--yet I may be wrong. The question remains, ... what IS logic? ... and what IS being in one's right mind? No one can absolutely decide! Let me see if I can review calmly my ridiculous position. It comes to this,--I insist on being mesmerized ... I have a dream, ... and I see a woman in the dream"--here he suddenly corrected himself ... "a woman did I say? No! ... she was something far more than that! A lovely phantom--a dazzling creature of my own imagination ... an exquisite ideal whom I will one day immortalize ... yes!--IMMORTALIZE in song!" He raised his eyes as he spoke to the dusky firmament thickly studded with stars, and just then caught sight of a fleecy silver-rimmed cloud passing swiftly beneath the moon and floating downwards toward the earth,--it was shaped like a white-winged bird, and was here and there tenderly streaked with pink, as though it had just travelled from some distant land where the sun was rising. It was the only cloud in the sky,--and it had a peculiar, almost phenomenal effect by reason of its rapid motion, there being not the faintest breeze stirring. Alwyn watched it gliding down the heavens till it had entirely disappeared, and then began his meditations anew. "Any one,--even without magnetic influence being brought to bear upon him, might have visions such as mine! Take an opium-eater, for instance, whose life is one long confused vista of visions,--suppose he were to accept all the wild suggestions offered to his drugged brain, and persist in following them out to some sort of definite conclusion,--the only place for that man would be a lunatic asylum. Even the most ordinary persons, whose minds are never excited in any abnormal way, are subject to very curious and inexplicable dreams,--but for all that, they are not such fools as to believe in them. True, there is my poem,--I don't know how I wrote it, yet written it is, and complete from beginning to end--an actual tangible result of my vision, and strange enough in its way, to say the least of it. But what is stranger still is that I LOVE the radiant phantom that I saw ... yes, actually love her with a love no mere woman, were she fair as Troy's Helen, could ever arouse in me! Of course,--in spite of the contrary assertions made by that remarkably interesting Chaldean monk Heliobas,--I feel I am the victim of a brain-delusion,--therefore it is just as well I should see this 'field of Ardath' and satisfy myself that nothing comes of it--in which case I shall be cured of my craze."