Page:The Song of the Sirens.djvu/13

 window-sill, once only, on the night of February 20th, 1911; the earlier portion as I dreamed it, sometimes twice weekly, sometimes once in six months or so, over a period of more than twelve years, from early in 1899. Three or four times the dream began with my escape from the massacre of my company by turning on my pursuers in the wood and killing the foremost: generally, however, it began when I woke in the dark in the dream and saw the light twinkling far away across the valley; I, in the dream, recalling all that had gone before. No existent path which my living feet have trod is better known to me than that dream-path from my hiding-place, down to the river-ford and up to the castle-wall; especially the latter part which, in the dream, I knew already by touch from my memories of my youthful acquaintance with it.

During the twelve years throughout which this dream recurred to me my waking meditations dwelt often on conjectures as to what I should find inside that window, if ever I got inside it. But, after all that pondering, the climax of that dream amazed me even more than the climax of the tale will probably startle a sensitive reader. I, in my dream, did not read it; it happened to me. The diabolical ingenuity of it still gives me spinal intuitions.

In many of my dreams I have noted that, while