ntly
far along the legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformations
to realise that the visions of this extraordinary little person had a
basis of truth for their origin.

After a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the room
and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red
cover. It had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and
proceeded to open the covers. The bright eyes of Mr. Mudge never left
him for a single second.

"It almost seems a pity," he said at length, "to cure you, Mr. Mudge.
You are on the way to discovery of great things. Though you may lose
your life in the process--that is, your life here in the world of three
dimensions--you would lose thereby nothing of great value--you will
pardon my apparent rudeness, I know--and you might gain what is
infinitely greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that you
alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the
other. Also, I rather imagine, though I cannot be certain of this from
any personal experiments, that you have here and there penetrated even
into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the
terror you speak of."

The perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the woman of Normandy bent
his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in reply.

"Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your
former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the
fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by
the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, has
further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of direct
inner experience. None of the knowledge you have foreshadowed has come
to you through the senses, of course."

Mr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble slightly. A
wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set it curiously
in motion like a field of grass.

"You are merely talking to gain time," he said hurriedly, in a shaking
voice. "This thinking aloud delays us. I see ahead what you are coming
to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen. A band is
again coming down the street, and if it plays--if it plays Wagner--I
shall be off in a twinkling."

"Precisely. I will be quick. I was leading up to the point of how to
effect your cure. The way is this: You must simply learn to _block the
entran