He slept well--three hours--until midnight. And then, all of a sudden, he awoke, clear-headed and sleep-less; his state as distinct from that of an earlier instant as is a bright cliff from the sea that slumbers at its foot. And now, he ceased being the automaton that had gone forth that morning and come back that evening, laden, it is true, with new experience and new possession, but until then unconscious save of the reality of having moved. He lay in his bed, high up above himself, as if he had stood indeed upon a cliff above the sleepy sea. It was a clear, white cliff. Before him, the sun lay on the opalescent waters. It shot a ray of flame below his feet. It struck the stone and fell back gleaming to the little waves that lapped it in. Above the sun was a purple cloud. In the cloud was orange lightning! There was the sun, farthest away from all, faintly receding toward the cliff, falling short and tumbling away into the water. There was the orange storm, lurid and encompassing, a little nearer--also beyond. And all about him, despite the sun, despite the glinted sea, was night. Upon it, these many things were visitations. Was he awake after all? Yes. For there, with all the rest, was his room. He faced a door--a very black door. Its transom was thrown open. And through it came the yellow vagueness of the hall. Other doors were also on that hall. And within them, other people. The little transom let them in and let him out. His watch sang away on a chair, next to his pillow. The vague light of the hall drifted to one side and met the vague light of the window at his head. In this conflict, he saw the meagre gleam of the glass in his bureau. In the morning, he could turn upon one side and see himself reflected there. Now it was a mere ghost of light--a grey pall hung over the darkness. He thought: “I can not see myself, now.” Then, he began to think of himself. The glass in the bureau had helped. Two years passed through his mind--passed many times; muddled pell-mell, grotesquely stressed, fancifully slurred, parts of them repeated with endless variance until his nerves shrieked for respite, other parts lurking away in the Hinterland, lurid yet ashamed. No reason for this disorder; no rule for the unimaginable gaps, the huddled over-determinations. And yet, withal, a rhythm and a lilt that held him there, gently receptive as one who listens to a well-studied symphony, finding it new. Rather a dream than a recapitulation. The one measured thing was the little watch, singing away that monotone, the time. Yet, since all the rest lay like a mighty matrix for that beat, it too must have had measure. Perhaps the master of this symphony was a complex composer--too complex to be measured, yet too great not to be enjoyed. Two years.