nd with something like passion, although aware that his
friends were but humouring him while they listened and made pretence to
believe. The strong card--if I may so term it--in his evidence was
undoubtedly Sir John Crang's cigar-case. It was found in Mr. Molesworth's
breast-pocket when they undressed him at the hospital, and how it came
there I confess I cannot explain. It may be that it had dropped on the
grass from Sir John's pocket, and that Mr. Molesworth, under the
hallucination which undoubtedly possessed him, picked it up, and pocketed
it before the two cattle-drovers found him. It is an unlikely hypothesis,
but I cannot suggest a likelier.

A fortnight before his death he sent for a lawyer and made his will, the
sanity of which no one can challenge. At the end he directed that his
body should be interred in the parish churchyard of St. A--, 'as close as
may be to the cross by the church porch.' As a last challenge to
scepticism this surely was defiant enough.

It was my duty to attend the funeral. The coffin, conveyed by train to
M---- Station, was there transferred to a hearse, and the procession
followed the valley road. I forget at what point it began to be impressed
upon me, who had never travelled the road before, that Mr. Molesworth's
'recollections' of it had been so exact that they compelled a choice
between the impossibility of accepting his story and the impossibility of
doubting the assurance of so entirely honourable a man that he had never
travelled the road in his life. At first I tried to believe that his
recollections of it--detailed as they were--might one by one have been
suggested by the view from the viaduct. But, honestly, I was soon obliged
to give this up: and when we arrived at the creek's head and the small
churchyard beside it, I confessed myself confounded. Point by point, and
at every point, the actual scene reproduced Mr. Molesworth's description.

I prefer to make no comment on my last discovery. After the funeral,
being curious to satisfy myself in every particular, I walked across the
track to the inn--The Saracen's Head--which again answered Mr.
Molesworth's description to the last detail. The house was kept by a
widow and her daughter: and the girl--an extremely good-looking young
person--made me welcome. I concluded she must be the original of Mr.
Molesworth's illusion--perhaps the strangest of all his illusions--and
took occasion to ask her (I confess not witho