In the streets were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on either side were either broken or filmily staring. The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane, and Kuranes wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or death. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night, through the gardens, down the terraces, past the great oaks of the park, and along the long white road to the village. He had been dreaming of the house where he was born the great stone house covered with ivy, where thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived, and where he had hoped to die. Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy. There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write.

His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name for he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and remind him who he had been. In a dream it was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward the distant regions where the sea meets the sky.

Hp lovecraft celephais