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He described everything fully and vividly: my brother could not know that his letters exercised a dangerous spell over the child who, at his departure, appeared to be so tranquil and so attached to the home fireside.
"The only pity," he wrote at the end, "is that this delightful island has not a door opening into the home-yard, into the beautiful arbor overgrown with honeysuckle, for instance, that lies behind the grottoes and the little pond." This idea of a door in the wall at the foot of our garden, and especially the association between the little lake constructed by my brother and distant Oceanica, struck me as very singular, and the following night I had this dream: I went into the yard and found it enveloped in a sort of deadly twilight that gave me the impression that the sun had been extinguished forever.
Every where there seemed to be an inexpressible desolation that is known only in dreams, and which it is almost impossible to conceive of in the waking state.

When I arrived at the bottom of the garden near the beloved little lake, I felt myself rising from the ground like a bird about to take flight.

At first I floated aimlessly as thistledown, then I passed over the wall and took a south-west direction, the direction of Oceanica; I had no trace of wings, and I lay on my back in an agony of dizziness and nausea as I travelled with frightful rapidity, with the swiftness of a stone shot from a sling.