ed the door
behind me. I seemed instinctively to know my way. I ran down a flight
of steps and along dark corridors through which I had to feel my way
with my hands, till I came to a small door in an angle of the wall. I
knew the room that lay the other side. A photograph was taken of it
and published years afterwards, when the place was discovered, and it
was exactly as I knew it with its way out underneath the city wall
through one of the small houses in the Aussermarkt.

"I could not open the door. Some stones had fallen against it, and
fearing to get punished, I made my way back into the council room. It
was empty when I reached it. They were searching for me in the other
rooms, and I never told them of my adventure."

At any other time I might have laughed. Later, recalling his talk that
evening, I dismissed the whole story as mere suggestion, based upon the
imagination of a child; but at the time those strangely brilliant eyes
had taken possession of me. They remained still fixed upon me as I sat
on the low rail of the veranda watching his white face, into which the
hues of death seemed already to be creeping.

I had a feeling that, through them, he was trying to force remembrance
of himself upon me. The man himself--the very soul of him--seemed to
be concentrated in them. Something formless and yet distinct was
visualising itself before me. It came to me as a physical relief when
a spasm of pain caused him to turn his eyes away from me.

"You will find a letter when I am gone," he went on, after a moment's
silence. "I thought that you might come too late, or that I might not
have strength enough to tell you. I felt that out of the few people I
have met outside business, you would be the most likely not to dismiss
the matter as mere nonsense. What I am glad of myself, and what I wish
you to remember, is that I am dying with all my faculties about me.
The one thing I have always feared through life was old age, with its
gradual mental decay. It has always seemed to me that I have died more
or less suddenly while still in possession of my will. I have always
thanked God for that."

He closed his eyes, but I do not think he was sleeping; and a little
later the nurse returned, and we carried him indoors. I had no further
conversation with him, though at his wish during the following two days
I continued to read to him, and on the third day he died.

I found the letter he had spoken of. He had t