…exhibition — and, on coming down to breakfast, learned of the death of a very dear friend.On another occasion, a day or two before I heard of the death of an old schoolfellow of mine,I dreamed I was fishing in a deep pool overgrown with rushes, when the first thing I caught — or at least which caught me, for I was eventually eaten by it — was a leviathan shark. I can see it now — a huge, slimy, blue-backed thing with a glistening white belly, eyes twinkling with devilish glee at the prospect of so sure a meal, and an enormous, gaping mouth furnished with what seemed to me interminable rows of saw-edged teeth. Snap, in I went, and the next instant the most frightful, the most excruciating agonies shot through me as a thousand spike-like points crushed into my flesh. For some seconds after I awoke I…

…which rise up before him with extraordinary reality and vividness. And each tableau has its meaning — nay, not merely each tableau, but each item in each tableau — from the quivering of a leaf to the hue of the sky and trees; and trees, flowers, grass, rocks and pebbles, even the glistening of the water, the whispering of the wind, the odours in the atmosphere — all, all contain a whole world of suggestion — of significance. And, yet again, in the fancies of delirium tremens, those wild, frightful fancies of snakes, and rats, and devils, that surround the wretched drunkard on all sides, and twist, and turn, and twirl — some red, some black, some blue — in these too, there may be meaning — each animal, each colour, each gyration each convolution may have its individual purport. Amid the most extravagant confusion there may yet be some…