Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/35

 seemed to be losing his fineness of perception. The point at issue was already half-erased. Those immensely powerful engines which drove the blood so furiously through his veins were in revolt. Let him find employment for them; let them fulfil their appointed ends, or woe betide him.

He had only to press his eyes to the table to summon the genie. Occasion would wait upon him if he sank to his knees. Let him harness his will to his common needs and the power would be rendered to him to achieve them. His imagination had no trammels; it was burning with a volcanic activity; by its light he could enter any kingdom in the material world. Let him ask, and all should be given.

He had fallen into a kind of trance in which immediate sensations of place and time were suspended. The cold room, now wrapped in an almost complete darkness in which rats were scratching and scuttling; the drip drip of the water to the floor; the rattle of the windows against the rising gale; the roar of the traffic in the street—all had become submerged, had lost their form, had been blended into a strange yet not inharmonious something else. A pageant was passing before his mind. He was powerless to identify himself with it, to fix its colors, to catch the expressions of the fleeting faces of those who mingled in it, yet despite the suspension of the functions of the will, he was conscious of what was taking place.

He was not in a dream, because his eyes were open, he knew where he was, and he was in possession of the sense of hearing. But he had surrendered the control of the will; and although he was