Nephel

fore that vision ? Or after? I asked. some time ago. What Did you fall asleepCHAPTER II. I Will not describe in any detail the next few years of my life. Each of them, of course, brought its own events and its own changes, its own growth of feeling and widening of sympathy and deepening of knowledge. But these are things which can be expressed for others only in their results, not in their passing; and there is no conspicuous event of any visible significance in my life, till about four years had passed since my strange experience in the school chapel. I had meantime finished my schooldays, leaving school with a good character and a moderate stock of classical learning, and had been for some time in a residence at one of the smaller colleges at Oxford, where I helped in my own maintenance by taking the post and salary of organist in the college chapel. I need not say that I had often and un- weariedly tried to reproduce the air which had come to me then with such strange and inexplicable sensations. But I had never succeeded. Nothing in all the four years had brought back one echo of that mysterious music, or one reflex of those strange sensations. My time of life was that in which the mind develops fastest, and new phases of thought had succeeded each other so fast that my old boyish life altogether seemed far behind me, and the time in the school chapel seemed most dream-like of all. Indeed I had come to believe that it had been nothing but... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.