‘Oh, my God!’ I murmured, ‘I am going mad! My brain is whirling, and my eyes make me see things which are not and so I sank upon the ground, and sobbed. Presently, I was somewhat better, and I manned myself. ‘It is but a feverish attack,’ I thought. ‘I will return and try to sleep.’ It was, however, with some difficulty that I arrived at the hut. My limbs felt as if loaded with lead, and the pain of an intense headache went like hot iron wires into my brain. When I reached our half-finished abode, I saw everything through a sort of haze, and the voices at my ear appeared to come from miles away. I was soon placed, lying upon bundles of grass, in the windward side of the hut, and after that I remember little more of what happened during three nights and three days. Only I know that my sufferings were very great; that my mind appeared to ramble as though it were a disturbed spirit or ghost flitting all over the world. Now, I would seem to be far away on the pleasant coast of Fife. The sun would shine, and the corn rustle and the yellow broom by the burnie’s banks smell sweet in the summer’s breath. But I could enjoy nought. I was as it were seared, and the sources of pleasure dried up. I saw the forms of people I loved, but I could speak to none. I saw my mother sitting on a sandy knowe, resting her head upon her hand, and looking over the blue sea. But when I would embrace her, there came darkness and pain, and the vision vanished. Then, perhaps, in my delirium, I would fancy I was at sea; sometimes it was in the old fisher-boat, the Royal Thistle. No wind would stir, the sky would be glowing like a heated copper globe, and the boat would lie moveless as though nailed to the unstirring sea. Suddenly my father’s eyes would look into mine with a long wan stare, and so would we sit glaring at each other, like famishing and despairing beasts, while months, and years, and ages, would appear to come and go and bring no change. Anon, the mood would alter. Then I was on board the old brig, Jean Livingstone, with a merry breeze and a blithesome crew. The bonny crags of St. Andrew’s Bay would seem under our lee, with the ruined towers of abbeys and churches rising over the green links, and fading from our sight, as we worked gallantly seawards. But the scene would straightway change to a furious storm in a mid-winter night, with the foam of the sea and the snow-flakes flying together. Then round the light of the binnacle there would crowd ghastly faces, staring into mine—faces with shaggy antique beards like the ancient sailors of Sir Patrick Spens, long, long sleeping in the wild North Sea; and so surrounded by these fishy eyes of hapless drowned mariners, I would feel the good brig seem to founder beneath my feet, so that I would start struggling up from my bed of grass, crying out that I was drowning—that the boiling waves were choking me!