Devlin was up and dressed when I awoke in the morning. I had not to go through the trouble of putting on my clothes, as I had not taken them off on the previous night. It would not have surprised me to find that I had unconsciously sought repose in the usual way, or that I had risen in my sleep to undress; nothing, indeed, would very much have surprised me, so strange had been my dreaming fancies. Naturally they all turned upon Devlin and the case upon which I was engaged. I could easily write a chapter upon them, but I will content myself with briefly describing one of the strangest of them all.
I was sitting in a chair, opposite a mirror, in which I saw everything that was passing in the room. Devlin was standing over me, dressing my hair. Suddenly I saw a sharp surgical instrument in his hand.
"That is not a razor," I said, "and I don't want to be shaved."
"My dear sir," remarked Devlin, with excessive politeness, "what you want or what you don't want matters little."
With that he made a straight cut across the top of my head, and laid bare my brains. I saw them and every little cell in them quite distinctly.
"To think," he observed, as he peered into the cavities, "that in this small compass should abide the passions, the emotions, the meannesses, the noble aspirations, the sordid desires, the selfish instincts and the power to resist them, the sense of duty, the conscious deceits, the lust for power, the grovelling worship, the filthy qualities of animalism, the secret promptings, and all the motley mental and moral attributes which make a man! To think that from this small compass have sprung all that constitutes man's history--religion, ethics, the rise and fall of nations, music, poetry, law, and science! How grand, how noble does this man, who represents humankind, think himself! What works he has executed, what marvels discovered! But if the truth were known, he is a mere dabbler, who, out of his conceit, magnifies the smallest of molehills into the largest of mountains. He can build a bridge, but he cannot make a flower that shall bloom to-day and die to-morrow. He can destroy, but he cannot create. In the open page of Nature he makes the most trivial of discoveries, and he straightway writes himself up in letters of gold and builds monuments in his honour. The stars mock him; the mountains of snow look loftily down upon the pigmy; the gossamer fly which his eyes can scarcely see triumphs over his highest efforts. But he has invented for himself a supreme shelter for defeat and decay. Dear me, dear me--I cannot find it!"
"What are you looking for?" I asked. "Be kind enough to leave my brains alone." For he was industriously probing them with some sensitive instrument.
"I am looking for your grand invention, your soul. I am wondrously wise, but I have never yet been able to discover its precise locality."
After some further search he shut up my head, so to speak, and my fancies took another direction.
All these vagaries seemed to be tumbling over each other in my brain as I rose from my bed on the floor.