confidant. He had been bitten by the desire to show
that he, too, had lived and felt many things, and the fever was upon
him.

He was certainly confoundedly allusive at first, and my eagerness
to clear him up with a few precise questions was only equalled and
controlled by my anxiety not to get to this sort of thing too soon. But
in another meeting or so the basis of confidence was complete; and from
first to last I think I got most of the items and aspects--indeed, I got
quite a number of times over almost everything that Mr. Skelmersdale,
with his very limited powers of narration, will ever be able to tell.
And so I come to the story of his adventure, and I piece it all together
again. Whether it really happened, whether he imagined it or dreamt it,
or fell upon it in some strange hallucinatory trance, I do not profess
to say. But that he invented it I will not for one moment entertain.
The man simply and honestly believes the thing happened as he says it
happened; he is transparently incapable of any lie so elaborate
and sustained, and in the belief of the simple, yet often keenly
penetrating, rustic minds about him I find a very strong confirmation of
his sincerity. He believes--and nobody can produce any positive fact to
falsify his belief. As for me, with this much of endorsement, I transmit
his story--I am a little old now to justify or explain.

He says he went to sleep on Aldington Knoll about ten o'clock one
night--it was quite possibly Midsummer night, though he has never
thought of the date, and he cannot be sure within a week or so--and it
was a fine night and windless, with a rising moon. I have been at
the pains to visit this Knoll thrice since his story grew up under my
persuasions, and once I went there in the twilight summer moonrise on
what was, perhaps, a similar night to that of his adventure. Jupiter was
great and splendid above the moon, and in the north and northwest the
sky was green and vividly bright over the sunken sun. The Knoll stands
out bare and bleak under the sky, but surrounded at a little distance by
dark thickets, and as I went up towards it there was a mighty starting
and scampering of ghostly or quite invisible rabbits. Just over
the crown of the Knoll, but nowhere else, was a multitudinous thin
trumpeting of midges. The Knoll is, I believe, an artificial mound,
the tumulus of some great prehistoric chieftain, and surely no man ever
chose a more spacious prospect for a sepulchre.