"What a farrago of nonsense, half-soliloquy, half sleep-talking, I've been thinking or speaking--I hardly know which. Hullo! Nodding again! This won't do! If it hadn't been that I'm sitting up, instead of lying down, I should have dropped right off to sleep that time. I was nearly off my seat, as it was. It was the forward lurching of my head and body which woke me, and the jerk seemed sharp enough to snap one's backbone at the neck, not to speak of making one's heart jump inside one, like a frightened frog. What tricks one's brain plays in a moment's snatched sleep! Three seconds ago I was awake and talking about one's thoughts turning into pictures when one is half-awake and half-asleep. After that I reminded myself that I must keep awake, lest the Dumpling should steal in upon me unawares. Then I suppose that for a second's space I dropped off; and again the thought turned into a picture in my brain. I was sitting, just as I am now, looking at the incandescent burner of that lamp-post in the side street to the right of the garden. And that reminds me. It's a strong light, and if I don't get a little farther back it is just possible that I might be seen by anybody who looked over the wall at the garden's end. That's better! No one could see me here; I'm well in the shadow. Yes, I was sitting here, blinking, as I say, at the incandescent light on the lamp-post, and as I sat I saw a black object, like the crouched figure of a man, creeping along in the shadow of the wall. It was the over-wrought brain playing tricks again--projecting out of itself the picture of the person of whom one had been thinking, so that one could easily believe that what one saw was the actual flesh-and-blood person himself. I'm morally sure I shall fall asleep in dead earnest if I sit here any longer. I think I'll steal outside for a moment or two, if only to stretch my legs, and to shake off the drowsiness which is coming over me." Very lightly and on tip-toe I crept out--to receive a sudden, sickening, crushing blow, which brought me blinded, and with the blood running down into my eyes and mouth, to my knees. CHAPTER XVII. THE MAN WITH GORILLA ARMS.