y name--Racine and Mudge. My father died before I ever
saw him. My mother inherited money from her Bordeaux relations, and when
she died soon after, I was left alone with wealth and a strange freedom.
I had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any connection in the
world to look after me. I grew up, therefore, utterly without education.
This much was to my advantage; I learned none of that deceitful rubbish
taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn when I awakened to my
true love--mathematics, higher mathematics and higher geometry. These,
however, I seemed to know instinctively. It was like the memory of what
I had deeply studied before; the principles were in my blood, and I
simply raced through the ordinary stages, and beyond, and then did the
same with geometry. Afterwards, when I read the books on these subjects,
I understood how swift and undeviating the knowledge had come back to
me. It was simply memory. It was simply _re-collecting_ the memories of
what I had known before in a previous existence and required no books to
teach me."

In his growing excitement, Mr. Mudge attempted to drag the chair forward
a little nearer to his listener, and then smiled faintly as he resigned
himself instantly again to its immovability, and plunged anew into the
recital of his singular "disease."

"The audacious speculations of Bolyai, the amazing theories of
Gauss--that through a point more than one line could be drawn parallel
to a given line; the possibility that the angles of a triangle are
together _greater_ than two right angles, if drawn upon immense
curvatures--the breathless intuitions of Beltrami and Lobatchewsky--all
these I hurried through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon the
verge of my--my new world, my Higher Space possibilities--in a word, my
disease!

"How I got there," he resumed after a brief pause, during which he
appeared to be listening intently for an approaching sound, "is more
than I can put intelligibly into words. I can only hope to leave your
mind with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of what I say.

"Here, however, came a change. At this point I was no longer absorbing
the fruits of studies I had made before; it was the beginning of new
efforts to learn for the first time, and I had to go slowly and
laboriously through terrible work. Here I sought for the theories and
speculations of others. But books were few and far between, and with the
exception of one ma