SOMETHING queer happened to young Mr. Jeremy Robson on the night of July 10th. Despite a lumpy sensation in the back of his neck and his habitual effect of being absolutely fagged out by the day’s work, he had gone to bed with the resilient assurance of youth that he would awake refreshed and fit in the morning. Instead, he woke up feeling aged beyond the power of the mind to grasp: a mere crumbling ruin, compared to which the pyramid of Cheops was a parvenu and the Druidic altars of Stonehenge the mushroom growth of a paltry yesterday. Worse than this, there was a dregsy, bitter taste in his soul. It grew and spread; and presently as he lay miserably wondering at it, developed into a gall-and-worm-wood loathing of the circumstanding world’s activities, but particularly of his work, the purposeless, futile, inexorable toil of The Guardian, daily re-galvanized into the appearance of life, but in reality doomed to swift and hopeless dissolution. For a moment his thoughts turned from hatred to Marcia. A receding vision, “the lands of Dream among,” hopelessly beyond the reach of a Failure. Inexpressibly old, Mr. Jeremy Robson wrote “Finis” upon the scroll of his fate and sat up in bed the better to contemplate the wreckage which had been himself. Immediately things began to revolve in his head. Wheels. Andrew Galpin’s wheels. Wheels of all sizes and brutally distorted shapes whirling in counter-directions with an imbecile and nauseous suavity, weaving into unendurable patterns the warp and woof of his comprehensive hatred. “Bosh!” said Jeremy Robson. He stood up and promptly fell down. “Too much pressure,” pronounced Doc Summerfield, arriving at speed. “You stop, young man, or you’ll be stopped.” “Give me something to steady me up,” begged Jeremy. “I’ve got to go to the office to-day!” “Have you?” returned the physician grimly. “Drink this.” Sleep descended powerfully upon Jeremy, blotting out hatreds and worries and all other considerations for the time. It held him in its toils for successive days and nights; how many he could not have told. Once he woke up, quite clear in his head, and looked out across a broad piazza, through elms and shrubbery upon the crested lake, and was about to congratulate himself upon his recovery (though he could not quite figure out to what pleasant spot he had been translated) when Mrs. Montrose Clark came into the room--which was, of course, delirium--and asked him how he felt and whether he was hungry. Later Doc Summerfield arrived, declined to explain, said, “Drink this” (he was always and forever saying, “Drink this”) “and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.” So, on the morrow--or it might have been the following century for all Jeremy knew--Doc Summerfield came back and delivered a syncopated monologue: