On the black rocks between the mountains and the sea, a wretched man is lying. The deadly cold wind blows through him, but he cannot die. It seems to him that he has lain there for ages, and will lie there for evermore, away from all things human; and there is not even so much as a flower to comfort the castaway--no life, no light, no love. Of a sudden, a faint pink flush illumines the northern sky. Hope comes back doubtfully to his despairing soul. He raises himself on his elbows, and looks with straining eyes up the icy north wind at the new light. The rosy light deepens and collects into a form, first thin and vague as a ghost, then gradually becoming distinct and solid. There is standing before him the figure of a woman, a gigantic woman, whose head reaches to the clouds--a Titan. Her beauty is beyond the beauty of earth. Her massive rosy limbs are more delicious than ever Greek sculptor dreamt of, and her long, fair locks blow out all over the heavens, crowning her head with a golden halo. Her lips are red and voluptuous, and pleasure sparkles in her eyes. She does not look down at the man, but gazes far away over the mountains and the seas towards the South. A breath of hope thaws the despair in his soul. Life and light and love are coming back to the regions of death. He lies there at her feet and looks up, and his spirit is filled with the sense of her beauty. His soul is faint with an impossible love for her, a love greater than the awe he feels in the presence of the goddess. He lies prone on the ground and longs that her great white feet may crush him, and that he may die at once. To be killed by her were sweet! Oh, that he were not a pigmy! that he, too, were a god, and might become fit mate of hers, might know her love! His desire, his intense aspiration reaches her. The Titan looks down upon him with a smile whose meaning he cannot understand; then she stoops and touches his heart with her hand. At that moment his wish commences to be realised. He feels that his body is extending rapidly; his stature is becoming that of a god. But now a fantastic and horrible idea seizes him. As he grows larger and larger, his senses, his consciousness, spreading through the mass, dilute lessen. As he increases in bulk, vitality diminishes; the numbness and coldness of death comes gradually on him. As his senses dim, the Titan woman fades away into mist, and all is darkness. He can no longer hear the sound of the waves, and his body still increases till it becomes as a vast mountain, the extremes of which are so far off as to be almost out of sensation. * * * * * Possessed by this fearful delusion, mathematical calculations kept running through the barrister's disordered brain--distracting sums ever repeating themselves, and he could not shake them off.