'What abomination is this! What monstrous blasphemy! Man the accidental descendant of the ape! Why is not this book burned by the common hangman? How can any printer and publisher be got so base as to lend themselves to this impious affront upon Heaven? Oh God, that men placed by Thee upon this earth of Thine, should defile it and outrage Thee with such heinous thoughts! Glory be to God on high, and on earth peace to men of good-will.' He drew back the curtain of his window, placed a chair to the window, put out the light, and sat down by the window, and looked out upon London in the hour of that greatest darkness, the hour before the dawn. Then he had a vision, and later on a dream. Part the Second. DEPOSING SATURN. CHAPTER I. A VISION. He saw an expanse of wild waters. The waters were grey and turbid from action of the winds. Clouds hung low over the sea in thick folds, through which came a dim yellow light. It was a November afternoon. A heavy gale blew from the north-east. In the plain of the German Ocean exposed to view nothing was visible but cloud and billow. This north-east piercing wind had come across the frozen plains and seas and mountains and forests and fjords of Norway. His eyes explored the north-eastern plain of water. He could see nothing but sea and vapour. Not an island, not a rock, not a ship was in sight. This vision had become familiar to him. He knew its history, its sequence, its goal. For years it had haunted him. He had now no control over it. Once he had read something, which had suggested it. Time after time he indulged his imagination in the spectacle of events following that open space of turbid sea in the Northern Ocean, and now he had no power to dismiss it from his imagination if he had had the will. To-night some unknown fear lurked in his consciousness. He could not tell what this fear was. It was strange, too, this vision now in opening before him had the aspect of a threat. Of old it had boded no evil. It had been nothing but an imaginative way of putting a guess, a theory. To-night, when he had turned his eyes first on that ugly space of wind-tossed waters, his spirits had suddenly sunk, and he had shivered, as if under portentous influence. Around him, beneath him, lay London, hushed in sleep. In no other part of the world was peaceful man so secure as in London. He had but to ring a bell, break a pane of glass, and shout, to summon succour sufficient to overwhelm a hundred assassins. What chilled and terrified Osborne was no dread of violence from without. There was nothing outside this room of which he stood in fear. And yet he trembled and felt cold and tremulously alarmed. No spectre of a wrong done by him rose up before his eyes. All his past showed nothing which could threaten his peace. He did not know clearly what he dreaded. He had a foreboding without a form.