and, burying
my face in the pillow, lay without motion. The reaction which was inevitable,
from the mental elation, the fever of the intellect that had been the first
effect of my tremendous experience, had arrived. The emotional crisis which had
awaited the full realization of my actual position, and all that it implied, was
upon me, and with set teeth and laboring chest, gripping the bedstead with
frenzied strength, I lay there and fought for my sanity. In my mind, all had
broken loose, habits of feeling, associations of thought, ideas of persons and
things, all had dissolved and lost coherence and were seething together in
apparently irretrievable chaos. There were no rallying points, nothing was left
stable. There only remained the will, and was any human will strong enough to
say to such a weltering sea, »Peace, be still«? I dared not think. Every effort
to reason upon what had befallen me, and realize what it implied, set up an
intolerable swimming of the brain. The idea that I was two persons, that my
identity was double, began to fascinate me with its simple solution of my
experience.
    I knew that I was on the verge of losing my mental balance. If I lay there
thinking, I was doomed. Diversion of some sort I must have, at least the
diversion of physical exertion. I sprang up, and, hastily dressing, opened the
door of my room and went down-stairs. The hour was very early, it being not yet
fairly light, and I found no one in the lower part of the house. There was a hat
in the hall, and, opening the front door, which was fastened with a slightness
indicating that burglary was not among the perils of the modern Boston, I found
myself on the street. For two hours I walked or ran through the streets of the
city, visiting most quarters of the peninsular part of the town. None but an
antiquarian who knows something of the contrast which the Boston of to-day
offers to the Boston of the nineteenth century can begin to appreciate what a
series of bewildering surprises I underwent during that time. Viewed from the
house-top the day before, the city had indeed appeared strange to me, but that
was only in its general aspect. How complete the change had been I first
realized now that I walked the streets. The few old landmarks which still
remained only intensified this effect, for without them I might have imagined
myself in a foreign town. A man may leave his native city in childhood, and
return fifty