tentatively, despite his boast.

"It was the pith and point of my contention! I mentioned the two moments
at which I hold that a man's soul may be caught apart, may be cut off from
his body by no other medium than a good sound lens in a light-tight
camera. You cannot have forgotten them if you read my letter."

"One," said the boy, "was the moment of death."

"The moment of dissolution," the doctor corrected him. "But there is a
far commoner moment than that, one that occurs constantly to us all,
whereas dissolution comes but once."

Pocket believed he remembered the other instance too, but was not sure
about it, the fact being that the whole momentous letter had struck him as
too fantastic for serious consideration. That, however, he could not and
dared not say; and he was not the less frightened of making a mistake with
those inspired eyes burning fanatically into his.

"The other moment," the doctor said at last, with a pitying smile, "is
when the soul returns to its prison after one of those flights which men
call dreams. You know that theory of the dream?" Baumgartner asked
abruptly. The answer was a nod as hasty, but the doctor seemed
unconvinced, for he went on didactically: "You visit far countries in your
dreams; your soul is the traveller. You speak to the absent or the dead;
it is your soul again; and we dismiss the miracle as a dream! I fix the
moment as that of the soul's return because its departure on these errands
is imperceptible, but with its return we awake. The theory is that in the
moment of waking the whole experience happens like the flash of an
electric spark."

The boy murmured very earnestly that he saw; but he was more troubled than
enlightened, and what he did see was that he had picked up a very
eccentric acquaintance indeed. He was not a little scared by the man's
hard face and molten eyes; but there was a fascination also that could not
be lost upon an impressionable temperament, besides that force of will or
character which had dominated the young mind from the first. He began to
wish the interview at an end--to be able to talk about it as the
extraordinary sequel of an extraordinary adventure--yet he would not have
cut it short at this point if he could.

"I grant you," continued the doctor, "that the final flight of soul from
body is infinitely the more precious from my point of view. But how is
one to be in a position to intercept that? When beloved spirits pass it