After some time Jack dropped off into a troubled doze. Strange dreams came to him, ending usually in some catastrophe that made him start up in sudden fright. Once he thought he was walking by the river, and somehow lost his footing and fell in. He woke up with a cry, "The water is so cold--so dark!" His father was at his side and soothed him. "Don't you remember," he said, "the dark river turns to light?" But as soon as the boy was quiet and at rest again, John Grayson added one more to the records in his note-book, and it was almost illegible: "We have both caught the fever. God help us! If I can, I will arrange----" Chapter IV A NEW LIFE "Among new men, strange faces, other minds." --_Tennyson._ After that, for young John Grayson, life was a blank. Dim shadows came and went like reflections in a mirror, having no continuity and leaving no impression. In a passing way, as a dumb creature might, he felt burning heat and freezing cold, pain and weariness, and nameless, indescribable distress. So too he saw forms around him--kind, dark-complexioned people, who gave him things to drink, and spoke to him in words he could not understand. Sometimes he was conscious of a sort of dull relief, or pleasure, when they cooled his burning brow with snow, which had been brought from the mountains packed in straw, and carefully preserved. But throughout all he missed something--some one. At first he knew that he wanted his father, and used to call for him piteously. But this passed at length; he grew too weak even for the pain of longing. With the very ill, as with the very old, "desire fails." Yet, in spite of all, he crept slowly back to life. One day he felt himself carried somewhere, and then became suddenly conscious of a delicious coolness after what seemed a lifetime of burning heat. Looking up presently, when the sense of fatigue had somewhat passed, he saw that he was lying on a large bedstead, like one of our old "four-posters," in the open air. There were white curtains all around him, which were being softly stirred by a refreshing breeze; while over his head--no roof between, not even the canvas of a tent--glowed the deep, rich blue of the Eastern sky. He was on the house-top. For a while after that he recovered more quickly. But the hot weather, coming early that year, brought on a sore relapse, and again for many days his life was despaired of. More than once the watchers thought he was actually gone, and often they thought the question was one of hours. Yet in the end the long conflict of death and life ended in the victory--the slow, uncertain victory--of the latter.