"What dreams had I of the wheel?" I repeated, leaning back on the mound, and clasping my hands across my eyes. Here was another instance of my new friend's insight. How had he known that the wheel was in my thoughts at all! Yet it was true that I had given rein to all sorts of fanciful speculations concerning it, and was now, moreover, quite in the mood to give them utterance. And what better auditor could I desire than a madman, whom the wildest extravagance could not disconcert, nor the most palpable absurdities annoy? The opportunity was too fair to lose. "What dreamt I of the wheel?" I exclaimed again: "I dreamt it was the mighty Wheel of Fortune, who, weary of trundling it about the world, had left it here amidst the sedge and spray of the waterfall. Henceforth, therefore, there shall be no more ups and downs in life, but mankind shall move for ever across one level plain, unchecked by darkness and uncheered by light!" "Would you have it thus?" "Oh no--not I! Come back, fair goddess! come back and wrest thy wheel from amidst those clinging vines and brambles--the arms wherewith reluctant nature strives to hold it back! Bring it forth once again upon the dusty road, and turn it as you go, lest our sluggish hearts forget to beat, and we cease to draw the very breath of life, and our souls, torpid and uninspired, grovel earthwards, nor dream of climbing higher than themselves! Bring forth thy wheel, and turn it for ever even as the world turns; for thy fickleness is the life of our lives!" "Methinks the wheel of misfortune were its truer title; for it turns ever between a fool above and a corpse beneath; and the laugh of madness sounds before, and behind is a track of blood!" "Nay, name it how you will; since all of human joy and grief, and life and death, have clustered round its course, as the moss and the vines cluster about it now. See how Nature seeks to make the awful symbol of destiny into a plaything for her own beautiful idleness! How fearlessly the light and shadow rest upon it! Yet it is bloodstained. Those rank ferns bend and peer in quest of some lurking horror? What is it? I feel its influence upon me." "Aye, you feel it!" murmured my unseen companion, tremulously; "and how could you help but feel it? Do not the tragedies of human life instil their essence into the things we call inanimate? You have shuddered when handling the rack and the Iron Virgin of the Inquisition, and felt faint at the sight of the guillotine and the gallows. You were awed by an evil influence breathed from the actual wood and iron--not by the mere knowledge of ghastly scenes in which they had borne a part." "How came the influence there?" I asked, humouring his grotesque theory.