derful than
anything else. The causes of all phenomena are equally adequate, and
the results equally matters of course. That you should be startled by
what I shall tell you is to be expected; but I am confident that you
will not permit it to affect your equanimity unduly. Your appearance
is that of a young man of barely thirty, and your bodily condition
seems not greatly different from that of one just roused from a
somewhat too long and profound sleep, and yet this is the tenth day
of September in the year 2000, and you have slept exactly one hundred
and thirteen years, three months, and eleven days."

Feeling partially dazed, I drank a cup of some sort of broth at my
companion's suggestion, and, immediately afterward becoming very
drowsy, went off into a deep sleep.

When I awoke it was broad daylight in the room, which had been lighted
artificially when I was awake before. My mysterious host was sitting
near. He was not looking at me when I opened my eyes, and I had a good
opportunity to study him and meditate upon my extraordinary situation,
before he observed that I was awake. My giddiness was all gone, and my
mind perfectly clear. The story that I had been asleep one hundred and
thirteen years, which, in my former weak and bewildered condition, I
had accepted without question, recurred to me now only to be rejected
as a preposterous attempt at an imposture, the motive of which it was
impossible remotely to surmise.

Something extraordinary had certainly happened to account for my
waking up in this strange house with this unknown companion, but my
fancy was utterly impotent to suggest more than than the wildest guess
as to what that something might have been. Could it be that I was the
victim of some sort of conspiracy? It looked so, certainly; and yet,
if human lineaments ever gave true evidence, it was certain that this
man by my side, with a face so refined and ingenuous, was no party to
any scheme of crime or outrage. Then it occurred to me to question if
I might not be the butt of some elaborate practical joke on the part
of friends who had somehow learned the secret of my underground
chamber and taken this means of impressing me with the peril of
mesmeric experiments. There were great difficulties in the way of this
theory; Sawyer would never have betrayed me, nor had I any friends at
all likely to undertake such an enterprise; nevertheless the
supposition that I was the victim of a practical joke seemed o