He often regretted that he was never in any dream anybody of historical prominence, so that he could have found out what became of him after the dream ended. But though he sometimes talked with notable persons—inwardly gloating meanwhile over his knowledge of what would be the outcome of their warfaring or statecraft, and of the manner and even the hour of their deaths—he himself seemed fated, as a rule, never to be any one of importance in the world’s estimation. Indeed, as Kennaston cheerfully recognized, his was not a temperament likely to succeed, as touched material matters, in any imaginable state of society; there was not, and never had been, any workaday world in which—as he had said at Storisende—he and his like would not, in so far as temporal prizes were concerned, appear to waste at loose ends and live futilely. Then, moreover, in each dream he was woefully hampered by inability to recall preceding events in the life he was then leading, which handicap doomed him to redoubled inefficiencies. But that did not matter now, in view of his prodigal recompenses.... It was some while before the man made the quaint discovery that in these dreams he did not in any way resemble Felix Kennaston physically. They were astray in an autumn forest, resting beside a small fire which he had kindled in the shelter of a boulder, when Ettarre chanced to speak of his brown eyes, and thereby to perplex him. But there was in this dream nothing which would reflect his countenance; and it was later, in Troy Town (Laomedon ruled the city then, and Priam they saw as a lad playing at marbles in a paved courtyard, where tethered oxen watched him over curiously painted mangers) that Kennaston looked into a steel mirror, framed with intertwined ivory serpents that had emeralds for eyes, and found there a puzzled stranger. Thus it was he discovered that in these dreams he was a tall lean youngster, with ruddy cheeks, wide-set brown eyes, and a smallish head covered with crisp tight-curling dark-red hair; nor did his appearance ever alter, to his knowledge, in any subsequent dream. What he saw was so different from the pudgy pasty man of forty-odd who, he knew, lay at this moment in Felix Kennaston’s bed, breathing heavily and clasping a bit of metal in his pudgy hand, that the stranger in the mirror laughed appreciatively. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ V Of Divers Fleshly Riddles A LITTLE by a little he was beginning to lose interest in that pudgy pasty man of forty-odd who was called Felix Kennaston, and to handle his affairs more slackly. Once or twice Kennaston caught his wife regarding him furtively, with a sort of anxious distrust....