or passed over me as I
observed that the eyes which glistened in the glow of my lantern were
huge, projecting bulbs, white and sightless. For a moment his great paws
swung over my head. The next he fell forward upon me, I and my broken
lantern crashed to the earth, and I remember no more.

When I came to myself I was back in the farm-house of the Allertons.
Two days had passed since my terrible adventure in the Blue John Gap. It
seems that I had lain all night in the cave insensible from concussion
of the brain, with my left arm and two ribs badly fractured. In the
morning my note had been found, a search party of a dozen farmers
assembled, and I had been tracked down and carried back to my bedroom,
where I had lain in high delirium ever since. There was, it seems, no
sign of the creature, and no bloodstain which would show that my bullet
had found him as he passed. Save for my own plight and the marks upon
the mud, there was nothing to prove that what I said was true.

Six weeks have now elapsed, and I am able to sit out once more in the
sunshine. Just opposite me is the steep hillside, grey with shaly rock,
and yonder on its flank is the dark cleft which marks the opening of
the Blue John Gap. But it is no longer a source of terror. Never again
through that ill-omened tunnel shall any strange shape flit out into the
world of men. The educated and the scientific, the Dr. Johnsons and the
like, may smile at my narrative, but the poorer folk of the countryside
had never a doubt as to its truth. On the day after my recovering
consciousness they assembled in their hundreds round the Blue John Gap.
As the _Castleton Courier_ said:

"It was useless for our correspondent, or for any of the adventurous
gentlemen who had come from Matlock, Buxton, and other parts, to offer
to descend, to explore the cave to the end, and to finally test the
extraordinary narrative of Dr. James Hardcastle. The country people had
taken the matter into their own hands, and from an early hour of the
morning they had worked hard in stopping up the entrance of the tunnel.
There is a sharp slope where the shaft begins, and great boulders,
rolled along by many willing hands, were thrust down it until the
Gap was absolutely sealed. So ends the episode which has caused such
excitement throughout the country. Local opinion is fiercely
divided upon the subject. On the one hand are those who point to Dr.
Hardcastle's impaired health, and to the possibi