and Hiouenthsang, and Cinderella sat on Laotse; and hanging above them a great dragonkite which would need a man to control it. I knew the Chinese lily, standing in the pebbles at the bottom of a bowl of clear water on the window-sill, by a globe of gold-fish; and, beyond, the Oriental street (for it was in the region bounded by Kearny, Stockton, Sacramento, and Pacific streets, where fifty thousand aliens make an alien city, a city as Chinese as Peking, except for buildings and landscape, and not unlike the narrow, dirty, thronged streets, with dingy brick piles, of Shanghai); the café across the way, with green lattice-work, and gilding, and gay colors in its gallery; the lottery-man next door, setting in order his little black book covered with great spots like blood; the rattle of dice coming from the half-open basement next to us; the cries of stray venders of sweetmeats; no sound of any language but the Chinese passionless drone, too cramped for all the changes of life's emotions, with its accent unswerving as Fate; the only women among the passers-by shuffling along with stiff outworks of shining hair, bright with tinsel and paper flowers, and wide sleeves waving like bat-wings, broad fans, spread umbrellas, and red silk handkerchiefs-sometimes in one of these a baby slung over its mother's back, perhaps one less gayly dressed tottered on goat-feet between two girls who held her up; little children like gaudy butterflies in green and gold, purple and scarlet, crimson and white, boys in gilt-fringed caps, girls with hair gummed into spread sails, and decked like their elders; an endless line of dark, mysterious forms with muffling blouse and flaunting queue, the rank, poisonous undergrowth in our forest of men. I was idly aware of all this. I knew that I, Yorke Rhys, quite care-free and happy, had nothing to dread. I calmly dropped down the tide of sleep-but what was this vivid and awful dream?-all in brighter hues and deeper shadows, and more sharply real than dream-land seems, without the magic touches of opium? As if looking in a mirror, like the Lady of Shalott, I saw all past scenes at once as a great whole. Against the mystic gloom of opium everything stood out as the night shows the stars; the soul had a mood that could focus All since the making of the world, and only then knew how far off, fading, stretch the bounds of Time, the untold reach of the Universe, which we wrongly think we daily see and know. I saw into it all as a leader reads an opera-score. I was unused to dreaming, being seldom alone and without time for long walks, and I wondered when my own mind mocked me with odd bits it held, jumbled and awry, like my own likeness in rippling

water, mostly what I had once thought of, but not as I thought it. Past events started forth, not as what I had gone through with, but as a part of my inner sense, with old fancies about passing trifles; as when one, though rapt in some strong feeling, may yet mark the number of notes in a bird's song, or of boughs to a tree, or of petals to a flower, as if the mind must be double, we think; but in my dream I learned that it is yet more complex. In the vast poppyfields of Bengal, likened to green lakes where lilies bloom, near the holy city of Benares, which dates itself back to creation, I idly plucked a white blossom on a lonely stalk, and flung it down, when it at once changed to a shapeless form, which chased me. Then it seemed it had been my curse through far-off ages, the frost that chilled me when I was a flower, the white cat that killed me when I was a bird, the white shark that caught me when I was a fish-in all places a white cloud between me and my sunshine. My horse, in gold armor, thickly gemmed, bore me from the field where a silk tent held my love, with others of King Arthur's court, to a gloomy-raftered cobwebbed hall, where shield and battle-axe were given me, and soon I wept over the shattered helm of one whom I had loved-yet killed. Where silver cressets shone behind diamond panes, and dragon-banners flew from gilded turrets of my castle, I waited at a postern in the wall for a note from my lady-fair, but the pale spectre of a scorned lover told me she was dead. Through the lapse of ages, over strange lands, in old and new-world town or wild, I often lost my way, but never the sense of an unseen foe. Now, at a masked ball in some old palace, where I was dogged by a white domino with whom I must fight a duel; then, in the red glare of the southern moon in the Arizona desert, through stillness overwhelming as noise, I fled from a figure hid in a Moqui blanket. By huge fires, I, too, waited the coming of Montezuma. Montezuma, held down by weight of the mountain which bears his profile at Maricopa Wells. My great white shadow flitted after me across the red and yellow of Colorado scenery. In the awful depths of Gypsum Cañon, I gazed in despair up at the round, well-like heights for chance to flee from It. At the Royal Gorge, peering from the cliff straight down for over two thousand feet, I gladly saw It at the base. Eased, I stood on a mountain-top, where, as I turned, I saw the four seasons-most wonderful view that could be brought by a wizard of old to a king's windows; but here I suddenly found a white mist that turned as I did, and strove to shape itself to my form. Crossing the plains of Nevada, It was the white dust

I was