much as your explanation--to the
effect that it was due to natural causes, and was chiefly the result of
your own imagination--comes dragging in at the tail of the story, as is
always the case in that most prosy of books.'

"'If nothing short of a ghost will satisfy you,' said Marzell, 'of
course that is so. However, this madman of mine with whom I'm now on
the most intimate terms--is a very interesting specimen; and there's
only one thing connected with him that I don't altogether like, namely,
that he's beginning to take to _other_ fixed ideas; for instance, that
he's the King of Amboyna, and has been taken prisoner, and exhibited
for money about the country, as a bird of paradise, for fifty years.
Now that sort of thing is capable of turning into a violent form of
insanity. I knew a man who used to shine as the moon in the quietest
and happiest madness every night, till he took it in his head that he
had got to rise as the sun also, and then he broke out into the wildest
violence.'

"'My dear fellows,' cried Alexander, 'is this talk for a place like
this, in the middle of thousands of people in their holiday clothes,
enjoying themselves in the bright sunshine? All we want to make us
perfect is that Severin--who's looking much paler and more pensive than
I like to see him shall have had some more terrible experience than
even we have, and will tell us about it.'

"'Well,' said Severin, 'the fact is, though I haven't been seeing any
ghost, still the mysterious, the supernatural, has come in contact with
my life so nearly and closely, that I have been most painfully made
aware of the existence of "the electric chain with which we are darkly
bound."'

"I was certain,' said Alexander, 'that the strange mood he is in must
be traceable to something out of the common.'

"'We shall hear strange matters now, I feel certain,' said Marzell with
a laugh.

"On which Severin said:

"'If Alexander's aunt deceased takes doses of stomachic drops, if
Nettelmann, the ex-private secretary--(for he's the madman, and a very
old acquaintance of mine he is)--has divined Marzell's good disposition
towards him in a glass of water, perhaps I may be allowed to tell you
of a curious instance of foreboding, or presentiment, or call it a
prescience, which I have experienced in the form of the perfume of a
flower. You know that I am living at the far end of the Thiergarten,
near the park-ranger's? Very well. The day of my arrival----'

"H