t all._"

II. HOW MY COMPANION FOUND HIMSELF IN A COACH

"There is one event in my life that I cannot account for," said
my companion, "and it has conditioned all my living, an event
psychologically strange. I appear, in a way, to have lost my memory at
one era of my existence. I look at the event I am going to relate,
and simply stare in perplexed wonder. Somewhere, somewhen, I lost
something in my mind! What was that something?

"Most people can tell the story of their life as they themselves
remember it. Their memory takes them back to their earliest years, and
the memory seems satisfactory to them. But there is a mystery in mine
which to my mind remains unexplained. I remember nothing before the
age of twenty-one. As far as my memory is concerned I might have been
born then. More strange still, I recognise nothing of a past before
then, and no one comes out of that past and claims recognition of me.

"This I remember in a dim phantasmal way as the very beginning of
things: my getting into a coach in a white mist. Even in that I
constantly feel a doubt that my imagination has been playing false
with memory. Certainly I do remember finding myself in a coach, but at
the startled moment when my conscious life began, it appeared to me
that I had never been anywhere in my life but sitting in the coach. A
certain intellectual _horror vacuum_ may have evoked that mental image
of an entering of the coach, but even then I wholly fail to fill in
the life and place from which I came. All behind that strange misty
entering on the coach-steps is grey, empty mist-land.

"It was a large, smooth-rolling coach, most like a commodious omnibus,
and full of a most jovial company. I sat half-way along one of the two
lengthy seats, and opposite me was a red-faced man, with large shiny
eyes and greasy hair. On one side of me was a jolly country girl of
about twenty-five, on the other a thin, dry-looking man. There was an
incessant din of conversation and singing; we were leaning towards one
another, and saying what jolly fellows we were, we should never part.
A bottle was always going round, and every now and then the postilion
blew his horn; six horses clattered in front, the dust rolled off
behind. I remember myself in a strange state of excitement.

"It was afternoon when I began to think. Actually, at that time I knew
I had no memory, but I dared not face the fact. I strove to evade
thought by being one of the company. How my c