to the crime.

On this point I should be sorry to be dogmatic, but at least we must
allow that the Buddhist priests must have had some very good cause for
the course of action which they so deliberately carried out.

Months afterwards I saw a short paragraph in the _Star of India_
announcing that three eminent Buddhists--Lal Hoomi, Mowdar Khan, and Ram
Singh--had just returned in the steamship _Deccan_ from a short trip
to Europe. The very next item was devoted to an account of the life and
services of Major-General Heatherstone, "who has lately disappeared from
his country house in Wigtownshire, and who, there is too much reason to
fear, has been drowned."

I wonder if by chance there was any other human eye but mine which
traced a connection between these paragraphs. I never showed them to
my wife or to Mordaunt, and they will only know of their existence when
they read these pages.

I don't know that there is any other point which needs clearing up. The
intelligent reader will have already seen the reasons for the general's
fear of dark faces, of wandering men (not knowing how his pursuers might
come after him), and of visitors (from the same cause and because his
hateful bell was liable to sound at all times).

His broken sleep led him to wander about the house at night, and
the lamps which he burnt in every room were no doubt to prevent his
imagination from peopling the darkness with terrors. Lastly, his
elaborate precautions were, as he has himself explained, rather the
result of a feverish desire to do something than in the expectation that
he could really ward off his fate.

Science will tell you that there are no such powers as those claimed
by the Eastern mystics. I, John Fothergill West, can confidently answer
that science is wrong.

For what is science? Science is the consensus of opinion of scientific
men, and history has shown that it is slow to accept a truth. Science
sneered at Newton for twenty years. Science proved mathematically that
an iron ship could not swim, and science declared that a steamship could
not cross the Atlantic.

Like Goethe's Mephistopheles, our wise professor's forte is "stets
verneinen." Thomas Didymus is, to use his own jargon, his prototype. Let
him learn that if he will but cease to believe in the infallibility
of his own methods, and will look to the East, from which all great
movements come, he will find there a school of philosophers and of
savants who, working on d