I only found it out just now, and saved your earthly life, mon beau
somnambule! It was a great surprise to me!

"Don't mention this to any living soul till I give you leave. You
will only hear from me on great occasions.

"Martia."

"P. S.--Always leave something to write with by your bedside at
night, in case the great occasion should arise. On ne sait pas ce
qui peut arriver!"

Bewildered, beside himself, Barty ran to his looking-glass, and
stared himself out of countenance, and almost shouted:

"I trust you, Martia!"

And ceased suddenly to feel the north.

Then he dressed and went to breakfast. Little Frau thought he had
gone mad, for he put a five-franc piece upon the carpet, and made
her stand a few feet off from it and cover her left eye with her
hand.

"Now follow the point of my stick with your right eye," says he,
"and tell me if the five-franc piece disappears."

And he slowly drew with the point of his stick an imaginary line
from the five-franc piece to the left of her, at right angles to
where she stood. When the point of the stick was about two feet from
the coin, she said:

"Tiens, tiens, I no longer see the piece!"

When the point of the stick had got a foot farther on, she said,
"Now I can see the piece again quite plain."

Then he tried the same experiment on her left eye, rightwards, with
the same result. Then he experimented with equal success on her
father and mother, and found that every eye at No. 36 Rue des
Ursulines Blanches had exactly the same blind spot as his own.

Then off he went to Antwerp to see his friends with a light
heart--the first light heart he had known for many months; but when
he got there he was so preoccupied with what had happened that he
did not care to see anybody.

He walked about the ramparts and along the Scheldt, and read and
re-read that extraordinary letter.

Who and what could Martia be?

The reminiscence of some antenatal incarnation of his own soul? The
soul of some ancestor or ancestress--of his mother, perhaps? or,
perhaps, some occult portion of himself--of his own brain in
unconscious cerebration during sleep?

As a child and a small boy, and even as a very young man, he had
often dreamt at night of a strange, dim land by the sea, a land
unlike any land he had ever beheld with the waking eye, where
beautiful aquatic people, mermen and mermaids and cha