Now, if this idea had come to Philip he would have executed it. As it was, Lewis’s drawing delighted him. He liked all those windows that made it look as if it were a dead stem rotting away. “But,” said he, “I know a house better than that, with a window for every day of the year. It would be just the thing for you, Lewis, because it is built without hands, without bricks, stones, cement, or any expense whatever.... It was only a dream,” he continued, one day as he and I were going down the long street which took us almost straight out into Our Country. But he did not really think it no more than a dream. He had seen it many times, a large, shadowy house, with windows which he had never counted, but knew to be as many as the days of the year, no more, no less. The house itself was always dark, with lights in some of the windows, never, perhaps, in all. The strange thing was that Philip believed this house must actually exist. Perhaps, I suggested, it was hidden among the trees of our woods, like several other houses. No: he dismissed this as fancy. His house was not a fancy. It lay somewhere in a great city, or at the verge of one. On his first visit he had approached it by long wanderings through innumerable, unknown and deserted streets, following a trail of white pebbles like the children in the fairy tale. In all those streets he passed nobody and heard no sound; nor did this surprise him, in spite of the fact that he felt the houses to be thronged with people. Suddenly out of the last narrow street he came as it were on a wall of darkness, like night itself. Into this he was stepping forward when he saw just beneath and before him a broad, black river, crossed by a low bridge leading over to where, high up, a light beamed in the window of an invisible building. When he began to cross the bridge he could see that it was the greatest house he had ever beheld. It was a house that might be supposed to contain “many mansions.” “You could not make a house like that one out of this whole street,” said Philip. “It stretched across the world, but it was a house.” On the other side of the river it seemed still equally far off. Birds flying to and fro before it never rose up over it, nor did any come from the other side. Philip hastened forward to reach the house. But the one light went out and he awoke.