be delivered. It is true that we
have the full and clear narrative of Smith himself, and such
corroboration as he could look for from Thomas Styles the servant, from
the Reverend Plumptree Peterson, Fellow of Old's, and from such other
people as chanced to gain some passing glance at this or that incident
in a singular chain of events. Yet, in the main, the story must rest
upon Smith alone, and the most will think that it is more likely that
one brain, however outwardly sane, has some subtle warp in its texture,
some strange flaw in its workings, than that the path of Nature has been
overstepped in open day in so famed a centre of learning and light as
the University of Oxford. Yet when we think how narrow and how devious
this path of Nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of
science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and
terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and
confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-paths into which
the human spirit may wander.

In a certain wing of what we will call Old College in Oxford there is a
corner turret of an exceeding great age. The heavy arch which spans the
open door has bent downwards in the centre under the weight of its
years, and the grey, lichen-blotched blocks of stone are bound and
knitted together with withes and strand of ivy, as though the old mother
had set herself to brace them up against wind and weather. From a door a
stone stair curves upwards spirally, passing two landings, and
terminating in a third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by the
tread of so many generations of the seekers after knowledge. Life has
flowed like water down this winding stair, and, waterlike, has left
these smooth-worn grooves behind it. From the long-gowned, pedantic
scholars of Plantagenet days down to the young bloods of a later age,
how full and strong had been that tide of young English life. And what
was left now of all those hopes, those strivings, those fiery energies,
save here and there in some old-world churchyard a few scratches upon a
stone, and perchance a handful of dust in a mouldering coffin? Yet here
were the silent stair and the grey old wall, with bend and saltire and
many another heraldic device still to be read upon its surface, like
grotesque shadows thrown back from the days that had passed.

In the month of May, in the year 1884, three young men occupied the sets
of rooms which opened on to