On the second day the fever increased and blood-poisoning in an acute form was recognised, but the patient was altogether rational in his mind. On the third day the symptoms of blood-poisoning were more pronounced. The patient fell into a delirium which lasted without intermission for the following three days. Most of the feverish hallucinations which filled his mind then passed completely away when he recovered consciousness. Yet Mr. Cromartie had a clear and vivid memory of one of them. This was, he knew, nothing but a dream, yet it seemed but to have just happened to him, and the dream or vision was singular enough for it to be put down here.

In the Strand people were hurrying along in little crowds like gusts of dirty smoke that was blown at intervals in wisps across the road. They were all coming towards him as he walked down from Somerset House towards Trafalgar Square. No one was walking the same way that he was, and none of the people he met brushed against him or even looked at him, but they melted away to right and left and so let him pass by. Sometimes when a band of them passed him he caught a whiff of their odour, and the smell sickened him.

They were frightened, they hurried by, but he was thinking of that great man Sir Christopher Wren, who had planned the street he was then walking in. But nobody cared, nobody had built it, though the plans were all there rolled up and ready, and just as good today as they were in the reign of King Charles II.

He lifted up his head presently, and up in the sky a white streak was being deliberately drawn. It was an aeroplane writing advertisements. So he stood still in the middle of the hurrying crowds to watch it; now he could just see the tiny aeroplane like a little brown insect. Slowly in the sky a long straight line was drawn and then a loop—surely it must be the figure 6. And then the aeroplane stopped throwing out smoke and became almost invisible as it went off tittering across the sky.

The numeral swelled and grew and was being slowly blown away when all of a sudden another white streak appeared and the aeroplane was drawing something else. But as he watched he was aware that after all it was the same thing again, another 6, and when it had done that the aeroplane mounted again into the sky and drew another 6, but already its first work was undone by the wind and in a few moments there was nothing to be seen in the sky but a few wisps of smoke.