I had begun my sojourn in the Land of Nod by a very confused attempt to conclude that it was all right for me to have an engagement to lecture at Manchester and Mitcham Fair Green at half-past eleven at night on one and the same Sunday, and that I could manage pretty well.

And then I had gone on to try to make the best of addressing a large open-air audience in the costume I was really then wearing--to wit, my night-shirt, reinforced for the dream occasion by a pair of braceless trousers.

The consciousness of this fact so bothered me, that the earnest faces of my audience--who would NOT notice it, but were clearly preparing terrible anti-Socialist posers for me--began to fade away and my dream grew thin, and I awoke (as I thought) to find myself lying on a strip of wayside waste by an oak copse just outside a country village.
I got up and rubbed my eyes and looked about me, and the landscape seemed unfamiliar to me, though it was, as to the lie of the land, an ordinary English low-country, swelling into rising ground here and there.

The road was narrow, and I was convinced that it was a piece of Roman road from its straightness.

Copses were scattered over the country, and there were signs of two or three villages and hamlets in sight besides the one near me, between which and me there was some orchard-land, where the early apples were beginning to redden on the trees.