so confoundedly sane and able that it seemed ridiculous. He kept asking me my opinion, as a lawyer, on the facts he offered. It was the oddest case ever put before me, but I did my best for him. I dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that, taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally, the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I wasn't quite serious. But Hollond was serious enough.

"He admitted that all three explanations were conceivable, but he was very doubtful about the first. The projection of the spirit into Space during sleep, he thought, was a faint and feeble thing, and these were powerful Presences. With the second and the third he was rather impressed. I suppose I should have seen what was happening and tried to stop it; at least, looking back that seems to have been my duty. But it was difficult to think that anything was wrong with Hollond; indeed the odd thing is that all this time the idea of madness never entered my head. I rather backed him up. Somehow the thing took my fancy, though I thought it moonshine at the bottom of my heart. I enlarged on the pioneering before him. Think,' I told him,

'what may be waiting for you. You may discover the meaning of Spirit. You may open up a new world, as rich as the old one, but imperishable. You may prove to mankind their immortality and deliver them for ever from the fear of death. Why, man, you are picking at the lock of all the world's mysteries.' : "But Hollond did not cheer up. He seemed strangely languid and dispirited. That is all true enough,' he said, if you are right, if your alternatives are exhaustive. But suppose they are something else, something What that 'something' might be he had apparently no idea, and very soon he went away.

"He said another thing before he left. He asked me if I ever read poetry, and I said, Not often. Nor did he: but he had picked up a little book somewhere and found a man who knew about the Presences. I think his name was Traherne, one of the seventeenth-century fellows. He quoted a verse which stuck to my fly-paper memory. It ran something like this:

Compassed about with Heavens fair, "Within the region of the air, Great tracts of land there may be found,

Where many numerous hosts,

In those far distant coasts,

For other great and glorious ends Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.' Holland was positive he did not mean angels or anything of the sort. I told him that Traherne evidently took a cheerful view of them. He admitted that, but added: 'He had religion, you see. He believed

that everything was for the best. I am not a man of faith, and can only take comfort from what I understand. I'm in the dark, I tell you. . . .'

"Next week I was busy with the Chilian Arbitration case, and saw nobody for a couple of months. Then one evening I ran against Hollond on the Embankment, and thought him looking horribly ill. He walked back with me to my rooms, and hardly uttered one word all the way. I gave him a stiff whisky-and-soda, which he gulped down absentmindedly. There was that strained, hunted look in his eyes that you see in a frightened animal's. He was always lean, but now he had fallen away to skin and bone.

"I can't stay long,' he told me, 'for I'm off to the Alps tomorrow and I have a lot to do.' Before then he used to plunge readily into his story, but now he seemed shy about beginning. Indeed I had to ask him a question.

"Things are difficult,' he said hesitatingly, and rather distressing. Do you know, Leithen, I think you were wrong about-about what I spoke to you of. You said there must be one of three explanations. I am beginning to think that there is a fourth. . . .

"He stopped for a second or two, then suddenly leaned forward and gripped my knee so fiercely that I cried out. That world is the Desolation,' he said in a choking voice, and perhaps I am getting near the Abomination of the Desolation

that the old prophet spoke of. I tell you, man, I am on the edge of a terror, a terror,' he almost screamed, that no mortal can think of and live.'

It

"You can imagine that I was considerably startled. was lightning out of a clear sky. How the devil could one associate horror with mathematics? I don't see it yet.... At any rate, I-You may be sure I cursed my folly for ever pretending to take him seriously. The only way would have been to have laughed him out of it at the start. And yet I couldn't, you know-it was too real and reasonable. Anyhow, I tried a firm tone now, and told him the whole thing was arrant raving bosh.

I bade him be a man and pull himself together. I made him dine with me, and took him home, and got him into a better state of mind before he went to bed. Next morning I saw him off at Charing Cross, very haggard still, but better. He promised to write to me pretty often. . . .'

The pony, with a great elevenpointer lurching athwart its back, was abreast of us, and from the autumn mist came the sound of soft Highland voices. Leithen and I got up to go, when we heard that the rifle had made direct for the Lodge by a short cut past the Sanctuary. In the wake of the gillies we descended the Correi road into a glen all swimming with dim purple shadows. The pony minced and boggled; the stag's antlers stood out sharp on the rise against a patch of sky, looking

glacier to the Col, and then he must have climbed the Mummery crack by himself. After that he left the ordinary route and tried a new traverse across the Mer de Glace face. Somewhere near the top he fell, and next day a party going to the Dent du Requin found him on the rocks thousands of feet below.

"He had slipped in attempting the most foolhardy course on earth, and there was a lot of talk about the dangers of guideless climbing. But I guessed the truth, and I am sure Dupont knew, though he held his tongue.

We were now on the gravel of the drive, and I was feeling better. The thought of dinner warmed my heart and drove out the eeriness of the twilight glen. The hour between dog and wolf was passing. After

all, there was a gross and jolly earth at hand for wise men who had a mind to comfort.

Leithen, I saw, did not share my mood. He looked glum and puzzled, as if his tale had aroused grim memories. He finished it at the Lodge door.

"... For, of course, he had gone out that day to die. He had seen the something more, the little bit too much, which plucks a man from his moorings. He had gone so far into the land of pure spirit that he must needs go further and shed the fleshly envelope that cumbered him. God send that he found rest! I believe that he chose the steepest cliff in the Alps for a purpose. He wanted to be unrecognisable. He was a brave man and a good citizen. I think he hoped that those who found him might not see the look in his eyes."

2 R

VOL. CLXXXIX.-NO. MCXLVII.

ON a hot afternoon in the middle of July, I took train at Haidar Pasha Terminus for Pendik, a village at the entrance of the Gulf of Ismidt, and there picking up my ancient fisherman Yanni, with his hulking son, and an extra slave to row, we waited for the Bey, whose smart 35-ton yawl was riding free outside the pier-head. Our party was small, consisting only of the Bey, my friend A., and myself, with the aforesaid fishermen, and a crew of three brothers and the house gardener, taking down flowers for the villa on the sea at Dermendereh. At seven o'clock our host arrived, and in ten minutes we were heading for Touzla Point under a fair breeze. One of the beauties of yachting in the Gulf of Ismidt is the night wind, which blows steadily from sunset till dawn, and no sooner had we rounded the head than we were served at the rate of a good nine knots. It was a glorious night, with the moon just waning from the full, and the air fresh and cool after the almost tropical heat of the day. The origin of the expedition was an old yearning of mine to make acquaintance with the big bass of Salajak, a place lying between Derinjeh and Ismidt, near the head of the Gulf on the European side. A. had just come back from six weeks spent in pursuit of them, in company with Niko, the hopeful son of Yanni, the

master of craft; and his record of seventeen-pounders caught on the rod, and bigger fish, as usual, lost, had fired my soul with emulation. When the Bey said to me over a cup of coffee in Stamboul that he was going down for the week-end to a little property he had bought at Dermendereh, not an hour's row from Derinjeh, and that if I liked I could come with him and fish, it was too good an opportunity to lose. And in spite of his recent long sojourn on the waters of the Gulf, A. was almost as anxious as myself to have another try for "that twenty-pounder" who had thus far beaten him, and he was included in the invitation.

On our way down, the Bey entertained us with bottles of stout, and stories of the revolution and of his own checkered career. He had been for a while one of the ruling spirits of the Committee, and was now contemplating the result of his efforts. It cannot be said, however, that he looked upon it with entire satisfaction, and no European critic could have been severer on the errors committed, or more keenly alive to the difficulties that still beset the new régime. He was quite s self-made man, and told us how, when a mere lad, employed in one of the Ministries at five pounds a-month, he had conceived the ambition of founding a newspaper. But he had not a farthing in the world, and to begin with he started trans