top of the morning, he, strolling through flowers of a sunlit garden, rejoicing in his youth,—discovers of a sudden that myriads of cane-like micro-organisms have taken lodgings in his lungs, and that the struggle for possession of them is "on" between him and invaders more ruthless than Vandals and Huns.
It was rather a shock. It did not come to him gradually, but abruptly, in a mouthful of blood—knowledge of the sort of infested tenement he had leased, consciousness that his spirit now, at any time, might be evicted without notice and turned adrift on the chill air. It was a shock, but it did not floor him.
On the contrary, it startled him upright, it stabbed him broad awake. He began to think and to feel with unwonted vividness. And in a world which had become singularly bright and sweet to his senses, a vision dawned for him and abided with him and widened till it made a background for all our banqueting and revelry. Should he veil it? Nothe. The first sentence of "Skin for Skin" flaunts his theme: "I first discovered that I had consumption during the small hours of a November night in the year 1909"—and it is 1925 now. In the entire period of his literary production, then, Mr. Powys has had a lively awareness that his house was on fire and that he was his house; that to Alpine snows and African heats he must flee from what he must carry with him.
A vision of life reported by a sick man under menace of death—may we dismiss that as "interesting, in a way," but not significant for the rest of us? Evidently Mr. Powys thinks not. His contention is that he, by a slight excess in the malignity of nature toward him, has attained an intenser sense than most men of the conditions which nevertheless confront and encompass
