I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness.

Sparkling points of light splutteredand shot past me.

They were stars, I knew, and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among thesuns.

As I reached the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back on the counter swing, a greatgong struck and thundered.

For an immeasurable period, lapped in the rippling of placid centuries, Ienjoyed and pondered my tremendous flight.But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told myself it must be.

My rhythmgrew shorter and shorter. I was jerked from swing to counter swing with irritating haste.

I couldscarcely catch my breath, so fiercely was I impelled through the heavens.

The gong thundered morefrequently and more furiously.

I grew to await it with a nameless dread. Then it seemed as though Iwere being dragged over rasping sands, white and hot in the sun.

This gave place to a sense ofintolerable anguish. My skin was scorching in the torment of fire. The gong clanged andknelled. The sparkling points of light flashed past me in an interminable stream, as though thewhole sidereal system were dropping into the void.

I gasped, caught my breath painfully, andopened my eyes.

Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me. My mighty rhythm was thelift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea.

The terrific gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall,that rattled and clattered with each leap of the ship.

The rasping, scorching sands were a man's hardhands chafing my naked chest.

I squirmed under the pain of it, and half lifted my head.

My chestwas raw and red, and I could see tiny blood globules starting through the torn and inflamed cuticle."That'll do, Yonson," one of the men said. "Carn't yer see you've bloomin' well rubbed all thegent's skin orf?"The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type, ceased chafing me, and aroseawkwardly to his feet.

The man who had spoken to him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean linesand weakly pretty, almost effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bellswith his mother's milk.

A draggled muslin cap on his head and a dirty gunny-sack about his slimhips proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirty ship's galley in which I found myself.