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Two years after in the Court of Queen’s Bench we met again, when I arose, the one essential witness to his misdoings, and made him feel as if my turn had come at last.

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Enchained by the innumerable complexities of modern city existence, how strangely, how sweetly, do the dreams of roaming amid isles of perpetual summer come to the pale slave of civilisation. Leaning back in his office chair, the pen drops idly from his relaxed fingers, while the remorseless hum from the human hive without loses its distinctive note and becomes by some strange transmutation the slumberous murmur of snowy surf upon far-off coral shores. The dim ceiling, that so often has seemed to press upon his brain like the load of Atlas, melts upward into a celestial canopy of a blue so deep and pure that it is the last expression of the Infinite.

On the wings of fancy, swifter and more easeful than those of the albatross, he is wafted to those fairy shores where Nature smiles in changeless youth and winterless glow. Through every weary sinew thrills the bright message of life, the unconscious outcome of perfect health absorbed from perfect surroundings. He is back again in the days of the world’s infancy, feeling his mid-millennial vigour bounding in every pulse, flooding every artery. In cunningly-fashioned canoe, with grass-woven sails, he floats upon the radiant sea, so like to the heaven above that his gliding shallop seems to swing through the boundless ether, a sprite, a fay of the fruitful brain.