falling rain speak plainly to his understanding. He has seen trees as men walking. His helot has unlocked the world behind appearance and made him free of the Spirits of Natural Fact who abide there. If he is not the debtor of his comrade—and he protests the debt—he should be. But the rascal laps it all up, as a cat porridge, without so much as a wag of the tail for Thank-you. Such are the exorbitant overlords in mortal men, who pass for reputable persons, with a chief seat at feasts.

[11]

Such things, you may say, read incredibly, but, mutatis mutandis, I believe them to be common, though unrecorded, experience. I deprecate in advance questions designed to test the accuracy of my eyesight or the ingenuous habit of my pen. I have already declared that the windows of my first-floor[12] lodger are of such properties that they show you, in Xenophon's phrase, τὰ ὄντα τε ὡϛ ὄντα, και τὰ μὴ ὄντα ὡϛ οὐκ ὄνγα. Now consider it from his side. If I were to tell the owner of those windows that I saw the policeman at the corner, a helmeted, blue-tunicked, chin-scratching, ponderous man, some six foot in his boots, how would he take it? Would he not mock me? What, that rat? Ridiculous! And what on earth could I reply? I tell you, the whole affair is one of windows, or, sometimes, of personally-conducted travel; and who is Guide and who Guided, is one of those nice questions in psychology which perhaps we are not yet ready to handle. Of the many speculations as to the nature of the subliminal Self I have never found one to be that he may be a fairy prisoner, occasionally on parole. But I think that not at all unlikely. May not metempsychosis be a scourge of two worlds? If the soul of my grandam might fitly inhabit a bird, might not a Fairy ruefully inhabit the person of my grandam? If Fairy Godmothers, perchance, were Fairy Grandmothers! I have some evidence to place before the reader which may induce him to consider this hypothesis. Who can doubt, at least, that Shelley's was not a case where the not-human was a prisoner in the human? Who can doubt that of Blake's? And what was the result, forensically?[13] Shelley was treated as a scoundrel and Blake as a madman. Shelley, it was said, broke the moral law, and Blake transcended common sense; but the first, I reply, was in the guidance of a being to whom the laws of this world and the accidents of it meant nothing at all; and to the second a wisdom stood revealed which to human eyes was foolishness. Windows! In either case there was a martyrdom, and human exasperation appeased by much broken glass. Let us not, however, condemn the wreckers of windows. Who is to judge even them? Who is to say even of 

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