e right side. If you, as an ordinary
careless person, were to bare his chest and feel his heart beating, you
would probably find it quite like the heart of anyone else. But here you
and the trained observer would part company. If you found his heart quite
ordinary, the trained observer would find it quite otherwise. And once the
thing was pointed out to you, you too would perceive the peculiarity
easily enough. It is that Gottfried's heart beats on the right side of his
body.

Now, that is not the only singularity of Gottfried's structure, although
it is the only one that would appeal to the untrained mind. Careful
sounding of Gottfried's internal arrangements by a well-known surgeon
seems to point to the fact that all the other unsymmetrical parts of his
body are similarly misplaced. The right lobe of his liver is on the left
side, the left on his right; while his lungs, too, are similarly
contraposed. What is still more singular, unless Gottfried is a consummate
actor, we must believe that his right hand has recently become his left.
Since the occurrences we are about to consider (as impartially as
possible), he has found the utmost difficulty in writing, except from
right to left across the paper with his left hand. He cannot throw with
his right hand, he is perplexed at meal-times between knife and fork, and
his ideas of the rule of the road--he is a cyclist--are still a dangerous
confusion. And there is not a scrap of evidence to show that before these
occurrences Gottfried was at all left-handed.

There is yet another wonderful fact in this preposterous business.
Gottfried produces three photographs of himself. You have him at the age
of five or six, thrusting fat legs at you from under a plaid frock, and
scowling. In that photograph his left eye is a little larger than his
right, and his jaw is a trifle heavier on the left side. This is the
reverse of his present living condition. The photograph of Gottfried at
fourteen seems to contradict these facts, but that is because it is one of
those cheap "Gem" photographs that were then in vogue, taken direct upon
metal, and therefore reversing things just as a looking-glass would. The
third photograph represents him at one-and-twenty, and confirms the record
of the others. There seems here evidence of the strongest confirmatory
character that Gottfried has exchanged his left side for his right. Yet
how a human being can be so changed, short of a fantastic and pointless