ry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it
lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton
had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from
our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man
may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost's
incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the
midst of an idle tale--as the coroner's jury would have us believe--is
no matter for my judging; it is just one of those inexplicable riddles
that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall
come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very
instant, of concluding those passes, he changed, and staggered, and fell
down before us--dead!

7. JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD

"It isn't every one who's been a god," said the sunburnt man. "But it's
happened to me. Among other things."

I intimated my sense of his condescension.

"It don't leave much for ambition, does it?" said the sunburnt man.

"I was one of those men who were saved from the Ocean Pioneer. Gummy!
how time flies! It's twenty years ago. I doubt if you'll remember
anything of the Ocean Pioneer?"

The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had read
it. The Ocean Pioneer? "Something about gold dust," I said vaguely, "but
the precise--"

"That's it," he said. "In a beastly little channel she hadn't no
business in--dodging pirates. It was before they'd put the kybosh on
that business. And there'd been volcanoes or something and all the rocks
was wrong. There's places about by Soona where you fair have to follow
the rocks about to see where they're going next. Down she went in twenty
fathoms before you could have dealt for whist, with fifty thousand
pounds worth of gold aboard, it was said, in one form or another."

"Survivors?"

"Three."

"I remember the case now," I said. "There was something about salvage--"

But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so
extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more
ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. "Excuse me," he said,
"but--salvage!"

He leant over towards me. "I was in that job," he said. "Tried to make
myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings--

"It ain't all jam being a god," said the sunburnt man, and for some time
conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms. At l