He moved in a maze of half-blindness,
half-delirium. He was lost in it, swayed by it. He began to wander about;
and there grew upon his senses strange delights and reeling agonies. He
heard church bells, he caught at butterflies, he tumbled in new-mown hay,
he wandered in a tropic garden. But in the hay a wasp stung him, and the
butterfly changed to a curling black snake that struck at him and glided
to a dark-flowing river full of floating ice, and up from the river a
white hand was thrust, and it beckoned him--beckoned him. He shut his
eyes and moved towards it, but a voice stopped him, and it said, "Come
away, come away," and two arms folded him round, and as he went back from
the shore he stumbled and fell, and . . . What is this? A yielding mass
at his feet--a mass that stirs! He clutches at it, he tears away the
snow, he calls aloud--and his voice has a faraway unnatural sound--"Gaspe
Toujours! Gaspe Toujours!" Then the figure of a man shakes itself in the
snow, and a voice says: "Ay, ay, sir!" Yes, it is Gaspe Toujours! And
beside him lies Jeff Hyde, and alive. "Ay, ay, sir, alive!"
Jaspar Hume's mind was itself again.
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