han
for any substantiality, for no reality can be so glorious as a dream.

"But there was the man at Sutlej, the man who had himself buried in a
wheat field for the edification of Alexander the Great, there to
remain until a wheat crop had passed through its stages from sowing
until harvest."

"The man at Sutlej!" exclaimed the doctor impatiently. "That a man was
thus buried, the pages of Quintus Curtius's history show, and the
Macedonian armies suddenly retreating from India, he was forgotten and
not one, but two thousand wheat harvests have been garnered over his
burial place."

"But the article in the _Revue Des Deux Mondes_, telling how he had
been found," objected the woman faintly.

The doctor looked at her in amazement.

"What will not people do to believe that which they wish to believe.
You, you, you!--do you ask me concerning that lie in the _Revue Des
Deux Mondes_? Oh, woman, woman! When did your memory of the details of
that hoax fail you? Not longer ago than ten minutes. A lying Frenchman
said he was on his way to France with a resuscitated contemporary of
Alexander the Great and that a full account of the matter would be
published in two or three months. Hilsenhoff left the duration of his
stay in the box at my discretion, enjoining me, however, that he
should not be taken out before the Frenchman had published the full
account of the Sutlej case, for we would then have many interesting
comparisons in his behavior and response to the restorative methods
used, and the reaction and response of this man buried two thousand
years to the same methods for restoring suspended animation. The
Frenchman never arrived with his man. It was all a lie. Yet by
following Hilsenhoff's solemn injunctions to the letter, we had an
excuse to leave him as dead, and you insisted that we should do so,
and I, weak and infatuated with your ripe beauty, I agreed. You said
that we would leave him in his self-chosen sleep and that he should be
our lodger. And so he has been and we have never called him to
breakfast in all these thirty years. We have even brought him to
America with us and he sleeps. Ah, no, we did not slay him. We but
obeyed his commands."

"Poor young Hilsenhoff. And I am his wife and he is but thirty years
old and I am fifty. Heigho!"

"Woman, you will drive me crazy," said the great annotator of the
Upanishads, and he left for a kommers with the nearest barkeeper.

"As if you did not drive me crazy, you