There seem to be two distinct kinds of dreamers; to judge at least from
their confessions next morning. There is the superior kind which dreams a
condensed novel and remembers it distinctly to retail at breakfast, and
there is the inferior kind which only carries away a vague impression of
having vaguely striven to stride out and escape from some nebulous
horror, or of trying to purchase a pound of golf balls at a counter which
would persist in turning into a couple of parallel bars or a roll-top
writing desk. Personally I belong to the inferior species, and I cannot
even swear that I really had a dream at all that night. I only know that
when I woke up at last I found that my oilskin was unbuttoned and thrown
back, whereas I thought I had gone to sleep with it buttoned up; and that
when I noticed this, I then began to have a confused memory of a dream
wherein I was seized by some one or something and struggled violently to
free myself.

I sat up in my bed of straw and looked round me. The sunshine was
streaming through a small window and under the door, but the door was
closed, the bar was very still and quite empty save for my own presence,
and the crowing of a cock and the clucking of hens were at first the only
sounds that reached me from outside. Then I became conscious of a soft
and regular "swish," rising and falling constantly and perpetually, and I
remembered the sea close at hand, and a shiver of gratitude ran through
me to think how narrowly I had escaped having that heaving surface
fathoms over my head.

I have often wished since that I had lain there for a little while and
tried to remember the dream, and whether I had actually gone to sleep
with my oilskin buttoned, while the circumstances, such as they were,
were fresh in my memory. When I thought of them afterwards I could swear