about midnight
I shall go mad -- I am mad -- I am gone to the devil -- I have lost my identity ; who knows in what place , in what age of the world I am living now ? Yet I will be calm ; I have seen all these things before , in pictures surely , or something like them . I am resigned , since it is no worse than that . I am a priest then , in the dim , far-off thirteenth century , riding , about midnight I should say , to carry the blessed Sacrament to some dying man . Soon I found that I was not alone ; a man was riding close to me on a horse ; he was fantastically dressed , more so than usual for that time , being striped all over in vertical stripes of yellow and green , with quaint birds like exaggerated storks in different attitudes counter-changed on the stripes ; all this I saw by the lantern he carried , in the light of which his debauched black eyes quite flashed . On he went , unsteadily rolling , very drunk , though it was the thirteenth century , but being plainly used to that , he sat his horse fairly well . I watched him in my proper nineteenth-century character , with insatiable curiosity and intense amusement ; but as a quiet priest of a long-past age , with contempt and disgust enough , not unmixed with fear and anxiety .