haps I myself don't know." "Whether his
were fine or not," I said, "he knows of one which he certainly did not
catch." "Everybody knows of one or two like that," said Stein; "and that
is the trouble--the great trouble. . . ."

'He shook hands on the threshold, peered into my room under his
raised arm. "Sleep well. And to-morrow we must do something
practical--practical. . . ."

'Though his own room was beyond mine I saw him return the way he came.
He was going back to his butterflies.'

CHAPTER 21

'I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of Patusan?' Marlow resumed,
after a silence occupied in the careful lighting of a cigar. 'It does
not matter; there's many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us of
a night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphere
of its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to the
astronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,
weight, path--the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of its
light--a sort of scientific scandal-mongering. Thus with Patusan. It
was referred to knowingly in the inner government circles in Batavia,
especially as to its irregularities and aberrations, and it was known
by name to some few, very few, in the mercantile world. Nobody, however,
had been there, and I suspect no one desired to go there in person,
just as an astronomer, I should fancy, would strongly object to being
transported into a distant heavenly body, where, parted from his earthly
emoluments, he would be bewildered by the view of an unfamiliar heavens.
However, neither heavenly bodies nor astronomers have anything to do
with Patusan. It was Jim who went there. I only meant you to understand
that had Stein arranged to send him into a star of the fifth magnitude
the change could not have been greater. He left his earthly failings
behind him and what sort of reputation he had, and there was a totally
new set of conditions for his imaginative faculty to work upon. Entirely
new, entirely remarkable. And he got hold of them in a remarkable way.

'Stein was the man who knew more about Patusan than anybody else. More
than was known in the government circles I suspect. I have no doubt he
had been there, either in his butterfly-hunting days or later on, when
he tried in his incorrigible way to season with a pinch of romance the
fattening dishes of his commercial kitchen. There were very few places
in the Archipelago he had not seen in t