I’m puzzled you see, just how to make you feel as I felt that night. I suppose, having undertaken to write this story, that’s what I’m up against, trying to do that. I’m not claiming to be able to inform you or to do you any good. I’m just trying to make you understand some things about me, as I would like to understand some things about you, or anyone, if I had the chance. Anyway the whole blamed thing, the thing that went on I mean in that little saloon on that rainy Saturday night, wasn’t like anything quite real. I’ve already told you how I had looked into the glass back of the bar and had seen there, not my own face but the face of a scared young girl. Well, the men, the miners, sitting at the tables in the half dark room, the red-faced bartender, the unholy looking big man who had come in and his queer-looking kid, now sitting on the bar—all of them were like characters in some play, not like real people at all. There was myself, that wasn’t myself—and I’m not any fairy. Anyone who has ever known me knows better than that. And then there was the man who had come in. There was a feeling came out of him that wasn’t like the feeling you get from a man at all. It was more like the feeling you get maybe from a horse, only his eyes weren’t like a horse’s eyes. Horses’ eyes have a kind of calm something in them and his hadn’t. If you’ve ever carried a lantern through a wood at night, going along a path, and then suddenly you felt something funny in the air and stopped, and there ahead of you somewhere were the eyes of some little animal, gleaming out at you from a dead wall of darkness—The eyes shine big and quiet but there is a point right in the centre of each, where there is something dancing and wavering. You aren’t afraid the little animal will jump at you, you are afraid the little eyes will jump at you—that’s what’s the matter with you. Only of course a horse, when you go into his stall at night, or a little animal you had disturbed in a wood that way, wouldn’t be talking and the big man who had come in there with his kid was talking. He kept talking all the time, saying something under his breath, as they say, and I could only understand now and then a few words. It was his talking made him kind of terrible. His eyes said one thing and his lips another. They didn’t seem to get together, as though they belonged to the same person. For one thing the man was too big. There was about him an unnatural bigness. It was in his hands, his arms, his shoulders, his body, his head, a bigness like you might see in trees and bushes in a tropical country perhaps. I’ve never been in a tropical country but I’ve seen pictures. Only his eyes were small. In his big head they looked like the eyes of a bird. And I remember that his lips were thick, like negroes’ lips. He paid no attention to me or to the others in the room but kept on muttering to himself, or to the kid sitting on the bar—I couldn’t tell to which.