ned room, he could still see the
white-splashed rocks of the island, and the clumsy penguins staggering to
and fro. But even these grew fainter and fainter, and, at last, soon after
he married my sister, he saw them for the last time.

V.

And now to tell of the queerest thing of all. About two years after his
cure I dined with the Davidsons, and after dinner a man named Atkins
called in. He is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and a pleasant, talkative
man. He was on friendly terms with my brother-in-law, and was soon on
friendly terms with me. It came out that he was engaged to Davidson's
cousin, and incidentally he took out a kind of pocket photograph case to
show us a new rendering of his _fiancee_. "And, by-the-by," said he,
"here's the old _Fulmar_."

Davidson looked at it casually. Then suddenly his face lit up. "Good
heavens!" said he. "I could almost swear----"

"What?" said Atkins.

"That I had seen that ship before."

"Don't see how you can have. She hasn't been out of the South Seas for six
years, and before then----"

"But," began Davidson, and then, "Yes--that's the ship I dreamt of; I'm
sure that's the ship I dreamt of. She was standing off an island that
swarmed with penguins, and she fired a gun."

"Good Lord!" said Atkins, who had now heard the particulars of the
seizure. "How the deuce could you dream that?"

And then, bit by bit, it came out that on the very day Davidson was
seized, H.M.S. _Fulmar_ had actually been off a little rock to the
south of Antipodes Island. A boat had landed overnight to get penguins'
eggs, had been delayed, and a thunderstorm drifting up, the boat's crew
had waited until the morning before rejoining the ship. Atkins had been
one of them, and he corroborated, word for word, the descriptions Davidson
had given of the island and the boat. There is not the slightest doubt in
any of our minds that Davidson has really seen the place. In some
unaccountable way, while he moved hither and thither in London, his sight
moved hither and thither in a manner that corresponded, about this distant
island. _How_ is absolutely a mystery.

That completes the remarkable story of Davidson's eyes. It's perhaps the
best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance.
Explanation there is none forthcoming, except what Professor Wade has
thrown out. But his explanation invokes the Fourth Dimension, and a
dissertation on theoretical kinds of space. To talk of there being "