ad--not in our sense. In that very month he published his book
on Number, and gave a German professor who attacked it a most
tremendous public trouncing.

"I know what you are going to say,--that the fancy was a weakening of
the mind from within. I admit I should have thought of that but he
looked so confoundedly sane and able that it seemed ridiculous. He
kept asking me my opinion, as a lawyer, on the facts he offered. It
was the oddest case ever put before me, but I did my best for him. I
dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that,
taking all that he had told me as fact, the Prescences might be either
ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which
had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally,
the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers
think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I
wasn't quite serious. But Holland was serious enough.

"He admitted that all three explanations were conceivable, but he was
very doubtful about the first. The projection of the spirit into Space
during sleep, he thought, was a faint and feeble thing, and these were
powerful Presences. With the second and the third he was rather
impressed. I suppose I should have seen what was happening and tried
to stop it; at least, looking back that seems to have been my duty.
But it was difficult to think that anything was wrong with Hollond;
indeed the odd thing is that all this time the idea of madness never
entered my head. I rather backed him up. Somehow the thing took my
fancy, though I thought it moonshine at the bottom of my heart. I
enlarged on the pioneering before him. 'Think,' I told him, 'what may
be waiting for you. You may discover the meaning of Spirit. You may
open up a new world, as rich as the old one, but imperishable. You may
prove to mankind their immortality and deliver them for ever from the
fear of death. Why, man, you are picking at the lock of all the
world's mysteries.'

"But Hollond did not cheer up. He seemed strangely languid and
dispirited. 'That is all true enough,' he said,'if you are right, if
your alternatives are exhaustive. But suppose they are something else,
something .... What that 'something' might be he had apparently no
idea, and very soon he went away.

"He said another thing before he left. We asked me if I ever read
poetry, and I said, not often. Nor did he: but he