re's eyes were still interrogative. 'Oh, well,' said the squire
hastily, 'it is a book I planned just after I took my doctor's degree at
Berlin. It struck me then as the great want of modern scholarship. It is
a History of Evidence, or rather, more strictly, "A History of
_Testimony_."'

Robert started. The library flashed into his mind, and Langham's figure
in the long gray coat sitting on the stool.

'A great subject,' he said slowly, 'a magnificent subject. How have you
conceived it, I wonder?'

'Simply from the standpoint of evolution, of development. The
philosophical value of the subject is enormous. You must have considered
it, of course; every historian must. But few people have any idea in
detail of the amount of light which the history of human witness in the
world, systematically carried through, throws on the history of the
human mind; that is to say, on the history of ideas.'

The squire paused, his keen scrutinising look dwelling on the face
beside him, as though to judge whether he were understood.

'Oh, true!' cried Elsmere; 'most true. Now I know what vague want it is
that has been haunting me for months----'

He stopped short, his look, aglow with all the young thinker's ardour,
fixed on the squire.

The squire received the outburst in silence--a somewhat ambiguous
silence.

'But go on,' said Elsmere; 'please go on.'

'Well, you remember,' said the squire slowly, 'that when Tractarianism
began I was for a time one of Newman's victims. Then, when Newman
departed, I went over body and bones to the Liberal reaction which
followed his going. In the first ardour of what seemed to me a release
from slavery I migrated to Berlin, in search of knowledge which there
was no getting in England, and there, with the taste of a dozen aimless
theological controversies still in my mouth, this idea first took hold
of me. It was simply this:--Could one through an exhaustive examination
of human records, helped by modern physiological and mental science, get
at the conditions, physical and mental, which govern the greater or
lesser correspondence between human witness and the fact it reports?'

'A giant's task!' cried Robert: 'hardly conceivable!'

The squire smiled slightly--the smile of a man who looks back with
indulgent half-melancholy satire on the rash ambitions of his youth.

'Naturally,' he resumed, 'I soon saw I must restrict myself to European
testimony, and that only up to the Renaissance. To do t