I stirred my brotherⒶ up, and we talked the time away while waiting for the magician to come. I said his coming was a most uncertain thing, for he was irregular, and not at all likely to come when wanted, but Schwarz was anxious to stay and take the chances; so we did as I have said—talked and waited. He told me a great deal about his life and ways as a dream-spriteⒶ, and did it in a skipping and disconnected fashion proper to his species. He would side-track a subject right in the middle of a sentence if another subject attracted him, and he did this without apology or explanation—well, just as a dream would, you know. His talk was scatteringly seasoned with strange words and phrases, picked up in a thousand worlds, for he had been everywhere. Sometimes he could tell me their meaning and where he got them, but not always; in fact not very often, the dream-memory being pretty capricious, he said—sometimes good, oftener bad, and always flighty. “Side-track,” for instance. He was not able to remember where he had picked that up, but thought it was in a star in the belt of Orion where he had spent a summer one night with some excursionists from Sirius whom he had met in space. That was as far as he could remember with anything like certainty; as to when it was, that was a blank with him; perhaps it was in the past, maybe it was in the future, he couldn't tell which it was, and probably didn't know, at the time it

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happened. Couldn't know, in fact, for Past and Future were human terms and not comprehendable by him, past and future being all one thing to a dream-sprite, and not distinguishable the one from the other. “And not important, anyway.” How naturalⒶ that sounded, coming from him! His notions of the important were just simply elementary, as you may say.Ⓐ

He often dropped phrases which had clear meanings to him, but which he labored in vain to make comprehensible by me. It was because they came from countries where noneⒶ of the conditions resembled the conditions I had been used to; some from comets where nothing was solid, and nobody had legs; some from ourⒶ sun, where nobody wasⒶ comfortable except when white-hot, andⒶ where you needn't talk to people about cold and darkness, for you would not be able to explain the words so that they could understand what you were talking about; some from invisible black planets swimming in eternal midnight and thick-armored in perpetual ice, where the people have no eyes, nor any use for them, and where you might wear yourself out trying to make them understand what you meant by such words as warmth and light, you wouldn't ever succeed; and some from general space—that sea of ether which has no shores, and stretches on, and on, and arrives nowhere; which is a waste of black gloom and thick darkness through which you may rushⒶ forever at thought-speed, encountering at weary long intervals spirit-cheering archipelagoes of suns which rise sparkling far in front ofⒶ you, and swiftly grow and swell, and burst into blinding glories of light, apparently measureless in extent, but you plunge through and in a moment they are far behind, a twinkling archipelago again, and in anotherⒶ moment they are blotted out in darkness; constellations, these? yes; and the earliest of them the property of your own solar system; the rest of that unending flight is through solar systems not known to men.

And heⒶ said that in that flight one came across such interesting dream-sprites! coming from a billion worlds, bound for a billion others; always friendly, always glad to meet up with you, always full of where they'd been and what they'd seen, and dying to tell

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you about it; doing it in a million foreign languages, which sometimes you understood and sometimes you didn't, and the tongue you understood to-day you forgot to-morrow, there being nothing permanent about a dream-sprite's character, constitution, beliefs, opinions, intentions,Ⓐ likes, dislikes, or anything else; all he cares for is to travel, and talk, and see wonderful things and have a good time. Schwarz said dream-sprites are well-disposed toward their fleshlyⒶ brothers, and did what they could to make them partakers of the wonders of their travels, but it couldn't be managed except on a poor and not-worth-while scale, because they had to communicate through the flesh-brothers'Ⓐ Waking-Self imagination, and that medium—oh, well, it was like “emptying rainbows down a rat-hole.”

His tone was not offensive. I think his tone was never that, and was never meant to be that; itⒶ was all right enough, but his phrasing was often hurtful, on account of the ideal frankness of it. He said he was once out on an excursion to Jupiter with some fellows about a million years ago, when—

I stopped him there, and said—

“I am only seventeen, and you said you were born with me.”

“Yes,” he said, “I've beenⒶ with you only about two millionⒶ years, I believe—counting as you count; we don't measure time at all. Many a time I've been abroad five or ten or twentyⒶ thousand years in a single night; I'm always abroad when you are asleep; I always leave, the moment you fall asleep, and I never return until you wake up. You are dreaming all the time I am gone, but you get little or nothing of what I see—never more than some cheap odds and ends, such as your gropingⒶ Mortal Mind is competent to perceive—and sometimes there's nothing for you at all, in a whole night's adventures, covering many centuries; it's all above your dullⒶ Mortal Mind's reach.”Ⓐ

Then he dropped into his “chances.” That is to say, he went to discussing my health—as coldlyⒶ as if I had been a piece of mere propertyⒶ that he was commercially interested in, and which ought to be thoughtfully and prudently taken care of for his sake. And he even wentⒶ into particulars, by gracious! advising me to be very careful about my diet, and to take a good deal of exercise, and keep

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regular hours, and avoid dissipationⒶ and religion, and not get married, because a family brought love, and distributed it among many objects, and intensified it, and this engendered wearing caresⒶ and anxieties, and when the objects suffered or died the miseries and anxieties multiplied and broke the heart and shortened life; whereas if I took good care of myself and avoided these indiscretions, there was no reason why he should not live ten million years and be hap—

I broke in and changed the subject,Ⓐ so as to keep from getting inhospitable and saying language; for really I was a good deal tried. I started him on the heavens, for he had been to a good many of them and liked ours the best, on account of there not being any Sunday there. They kept Saturday, and it was very pleasant: plentyⒶ of rest for the tired, and plenty of innocent good times for the others. But no Sunday, he said; the Sunday-Sabbath was a commercial invention and quite local, having beenⒶ devised by Constantine to equalizeⒶ prosperities in this worldⒶ between the Jews and the Christians. The government statistics of that periodⒶ showed that a JewⒶ could make as much money in five days as a Christian could in six; and so ConstantineⒶ saw that at this rate the Jews would by and by have all the wealth and the Christians all the poverty. There was nothing fair nor right about this, a righteous government should have equal laws for all, and take just as much care of the incompetent as of the competent—more, if anything. So he added the Sunday-Sabbath, and it worked just right, because it equalized the prosperities. After that, the Jew had to lie idle 104 days in the year, the Christian only 52, and this enabled the Christian to catch up. But my brother said there was now talk among Constantine and other early Christians up there, of some more equalizing; because, in looking forward a few centuries they could notice that along in the twentieth century somewhere it was going to be necessary to furnish the Jews another Sabbath to keep, so as to save what might be left of Christian property at that time. Schwarz said he had been down into the first quarter of the twentieth century lately, and it looked so to him.

Then he “side-tracked” in his abrupt way, and looked avidly at

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my head and said he did wish he was back in my skull, he would sail out the first time I fell asleep and have a scandalous good time! —wasn't that magician ever coming back?

“And oh,” he said, “what wouldn't I see! wonders, spectacles, splendors which your fleshly eyes couldn't endure; and what wouldn't I hear!Ⓐ the music of the spheres—no mortal could live through five minutes of that ecstasy! If he would only come! If he . . . .” He stopped, with his lips parted and his eyes fixed, like one raptⒶ. After a moment he whispered, “do you feel that?”

I recognized it; it was that life-giving, refreshing, mysterious something which invaded the air when 44Ⓐ was around. But I dissembled, and said—

“What is it?”

“It's the magician; he's coming. He doesn't always let that influence go out from him, and so we dream-sprites took him for an ordinary necromancer for a while; but when he burnt 44 we were all there and close by, and he let it out then, and in an instant we knew what he was! We knew he was a . . . we knew he was a . . . . a . . . a . . . howⒶ curious!—my tongue won't say it!”

Yes, you see, 44 wouldn't let him say it—and I so near to getting that secret at last! It was a sorrowful disappointment.

Forty-Four entered, still in the disguise of the magician, and Schwarz flung himself on his knees and began to beg passionately for release,Ⓐ and I put in my voice and helped. Schwarz said—

“Oh, mighty one, you imprisoned me, you can set me free, and no other can. You have the power; you possess all the powers, all the forces that defy Nature, nothing is impossible to you, for you are a . . . a . . .”

So there it wasⒶ again—he couldn't say it. I was that close to it a second time, you see; 44 wouldn't let him say that word, and I would have given anything in the world to hear it. It's the way we are made, you know: if we can get a thing, we don't want it, but if we can't get it, why—well, it changes the whole aspect of it, you see.

Forty-Four was very good about it. He said he would let this one go—Schwarz was hugging him around the knees and lifting up the

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hem of his robe and kissing it and kissing it before he could get any further with his remark—yes, he would let this one go, and make some fresh ones for the wedding, the family could get along very well that way. So he told Schwarz to stand up and melt. Schwarz did it, and it was very pretty. First, his clothes thinned out so you could see him through them, then they floated off like shreds of vapor, leaving him naked, then the cat looked in, but scrambled out again; next, the flesh fell to thinning, and you could see the skeleton through it, very neat and trim, a good skeleton; next the bones disappeared and nothing was left but the empty form—just a statue, perfect and beautiful, made out of the delicatest soap-bubble stuff, with rainbow-hues dreaming around over it and the furniture showing through it the same as it would through a bubble;Ⓐ then—poof! and it was gone!