y at Dr. Raymond. "Are you perfectly sure, Raymond,
that your theory is not a phantasmagoria--a splendid vision, certainly,
but a mere vision after all?"

Dr. Raymond stopped in his walk and turned sharply. He was a
middle-aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow complexion, but as he
answered Clarke and faced him, there was a flush on his cheek.

"Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following
after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields
of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river.
You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you
that all these things--yes, from that star that has just shone out in
the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet--I say that all these are
but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our
eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this
vision, beyond these 'chases in Arras, dreams in a career,' beyond them
all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever
lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it
lifted this very night from before another's eyes. You may think this
all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the
ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the
god Pan."

Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the river was chilly.

"It is wonderful indeed," he said. "We are standing on the brink of a
strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife
is absolutely necessary?"

"Yes; a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all; a trifling
rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would
escape the attention of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred.
I don't want to bother you with 'shop,' Clarke; I might give you a mass
of technical detail which would sound very imposing, and would leave
you as enlightened as you are now. But I suppose you have read,
casually, in out-of-the-way corners of your paper, that immense strides
have been made recently in the physiology of the brain. I saw a
paragraph the other day about Digby's theory, and Browne Faber's
discoveries. Theories and discoveries! Where they are standing now, I
stood fifteen years ago, and I need not tell you that I have not been
standing still for the last fifteen years. It will be enough if I say
that five years ago I made the discovery that I all