The scroll of the dream unwound; the dreamer moved, easing his position, shaking back a lock of dark hair that had fallen across his forehead.  He was no longer rocking to the power of the north express; he was standing on the platform at the end of a little train that puffed out of the Finland station—­a primitive, miniature train, white with frost and powdered with the ashes of its wood fuel.  The vision came and passed a sketch, not a picture—­a suggestion of straight tracks, wide snow plains, and the blue, misty blur of fir woods.  Then a shifting, a juggling of effects!  Abo, the Finnish port, painted itself upon his imagination, and he was embarked upon the lonely sledge-drive, to the harbor.  He started in his sleep, shivered and sighed at that remembered drive.  The train passed over new points, the hoods of the lamps swayed, the lights blinked and winked, and his mind swung onward in response to the physical jar.

Abo was obliterated.  He was on board a ship—­a ship ploughing her way through the ice-fields as she neared Stockholm; salt sea air flicked his nostrils, he heard the broken ice tearing the keel like a million files, he was sensible of the crucial sensation—­the tremendous quiver—­as the vessel slipped from her bondage into the cradle of the sea, a sentient thing welcoming her own element!

The heart of the dreamer leaped to that strange sensation.  He drew a long, sharp breath, and sat up, suddenly awake.  It was over and done with—­the coldness, the rigor, the region of ice bonds!  The fingers of the future beckoned to him; the promises of the future lapped his ears as the waves had lapped the ship’s sides.

He looked about him, at first excitedly, then confusedly, then a little shamedfacedly, for we are always involuntarily shamed at being tricked by our emotions into a false conception.  Drawing his hand from his coat-pocket, he stretched himself with an assumption of ease, as though he saw and recognized the twinkle in the electric lamps and spontaneously rose to its demands.

The train was flying forward at unabated speed.  Outside, the raw January air was clinging in a film to the carriage window; inside, the dim light and overheated air made an artificial atmosphere, enervating or stimulating according to the traveller’s gifts.  To this solitary voyager stimulation was obviously the effect produced, for, try as he might to cheat the inquisitive lamps, interest in every detail of his surroundings was portrayed in his face, in the poise of his head, the quickness of his glance as he gazed round the compartment, verifying the impression that he was alone.

[Illustration:  Standing again in the outer court of A house in Petersburg]