Even as a perfume may create for us the spectre of a vanished day, or as a melody may suddenly evoke for us the forgotten tone of some dear voice,--so may the sound or sight of a name momentarily revive for us all the faded colors of some memory-portrait so beautiful, so beloved, that we had become afraid to look at it, and had permitted innumerable spiders of Monotony to weave their tintless gauze before its face. But we have had experiences which are now so long dead and so profoundly sepultured in the Cemetery of Recollection that no mnemonic necromancy can lend them recognizable outline; they have become totally spiritualized, and reveal themselves only as faint wind-stirrings in the atmosphere of Thought. Surely the experience connected in some vague way with that blonde name must have belonged to these:--the memory _had_ been; for I knew the presence of its ghost; but viewless it obstinately remained. It pursued me through the amber afternoon. By some inexplicable mental process I discovered that it had been also associated with an idea of death, a melancholy fancy, at the time, that I had heard or had seen it before.--But when?--but where did I first learn that name? ... Night came, but brought with it no answer to the enigma. I watched the moon,--a new moon, yellow and curved like a young banana,--droop over the dreaming sea: there were sparklings like effervescence through the archway of stars,--perhaps the molecular motion of some Astral Thought. Then seemed to fall upon the world a hush like the hush of sanctuaries,--like that _Silence of Secrets_ told of in the Bhagavad-Gita: the peace of the Immensities. In such hours fancies come to us like gusts of seawind,--as vast and pure; nay, sometimes vaster,--measureless like the interspaces between sun and sun. For it is only in these voiceless moments that the heavens speak to us,--telling of mysteries beyond the luminous signaling of astral deep unto astral deep, beyond the furthest burning of constellations; mysteries that shall still be mysteries when our day-star shall have yielded up his ghost of flame.--The death of a man; the death of a sun:--is the awful Universe affected any more by the last than by the first? And with this question, the question of the morning returned, enigmatic as before,--bringing to me the indescribable, creeping, electrical sensation that we are said to feel especially when some heedless foot is treading the place of our future grave. It was late when I sought sleep that night--my last Floridian night. And I dreamed strange dreams. First, I dreamed of a plant,--a plant with sombre cordiform leaves,--that _bent away from the light toward me_, and followed me persistently when I retreated from it; crawling like a pet reptile to get in front of me, and then rising up slowly, very slowly; stretching out to me, as with dumb affection, two helpless arms--two long leafy stems tipped with blood-colored flowers.