How I managed to keep on talking is rather more than I can tell. I can only say that I continued automatically, and paid the slightest possible attention to the antics with which my auditors were pleased to amuse themselves. I was but little surprised when, after a while, they began to leave. Not concertedly, but one by one, they rose and passed out, still lowering, giggling, trembling, looking askance at me, or exhibiting some other inexplicable emotion as they departed. Each one, with whatever mien, took pains to leave a record in the form of a few sheets of paper deposited on my desk as he passed out, but I was too callous or too distraught by this time to do more than barely notice the circumstance. As for my visitors from France, they had long since disappeared--not by walking out, like the students, but simply by vanishing, as people in a dream occasionally do. I kept lecturing, doggedly, until I had only three students left. But when two of these arose together and took their departure, I knew nothing to do but cease. The one auditor remaining, for that matter, was even now about to rise from his seat. I paused. I waited as he came slowly forward, with wonder and distress written on his features--he was easily the best scholar in the class. As I eyed him I could see that he, like so many of the rest, seemed to be half afraid that I had lost my mind. We shall see about that, I thought, as I addressed him. "Will you kindly tell me, sir," I asked him, with some warmth, "Will you kindly tell me what I have done to deserve such conduct as I have seen this last hour? Have all my students gone mad, or have I?" Evidently I had, he thought, as was obvious in his face. But he was too cautious to say so. Instead, he manifestly did his best to placate what to him was arrant lunacy. "Well, professor," he faltered, "I've no doubt we've been behaving rather badly. But, you see, we--well, we simply couldn't make out why you should want to lecture all through the examination hour!" So that, of all things, was the explanation! I had simply lectured straight through their examination, and small wonder they took it strangely. How I had managed to make such a fool of myself, I did not know; but at once all their queer actions of the last hour were explained to me. And what a joke on me! How like the absent-minded, umbrella-carrying professor of the caricaturists--I protest I am not that kind--to have forgotten that I had set the examination for that day, had even sent a secretary into the class five minutes ahead of me to distribute the question-papers, and to have gone in then and insisted on haranguing the class, in spite of all protest, through the whole session! And thus laughing at my exploit, I awoke. Needless to say, my amusement continued into the waking state, though it was somewhat less whole-hearted. But it was soon cut short by my jumping out of bed to put down the notes of the dream that I have here expanded.