He laughed to think of her confusion now.
But here again, at the very zenith of a shout, was he frozen to silence by a vision--this time one too obviously of no ponderable fabric.

There in the corner, almost at his hand, seemed to be a thing that he had dreamed of possessing only after he entered Heaven--a candy cane: one of fearful length, thick of girth, vast of crook, and wide in the spiral stripe that seemed to run a living flame before his ravished eyes, beginning at the bottom and winding around and around the whole dizzy height.

Fearfully in nerve-braced silence he leaned far out of his bed to bring against this amazing apparition one cool, impartial forefinger of skeptic research.

It did not vanish; it resisted his touch.

Then his heart fainted with rapture, for he knew the unimagined had become history.
Standing before the windows of the great, he had gazed long at these creations.