with
the station clock, and finally looked up at the moving train as if in
disapproval. Ezekiel lost sight of him in the crowd, and then, at the
same moment, he was taking his seat opposite again.

Ezekiel said, "I thought you were going to miss the train,
characteristically, for the sake of setting your watch." And Auber
replied, rather queerly: "Great God! It's impossible now; I can see
that." Ezekiel did not know what he meant, but remembered it afterward
when we were talking the whole thing over in this room.

Besides Ezekiel, there were four men who saw him after the train left
Newark; and the porter remembered holding the vestibule door and
trap-platform open for some one as the train pulled out.

Then there is my coachman who drove him to the train, here in Barrelton,
who had his tip of a silver dollar from him. Put it in his pocket--and
then--lost it, of course. You see, there's the most conclusive link in
the chain. If William had produced his dollar, or my engineer had
received that letter, the whole thing would fall through--jugglery and
imposition, mere ordinary faking. The hypnotic theory might still hold,
but it must stretch fifty miles to an improbable source in a man who is,
at the time, dying strangely on my bed.

Of course, there is no use asking if any one on the train touched
him,--not only saw and heard him, but shook hands with him, let us say.
It is the same story as William's, or not so good. Ezekiel is sure that
he shook hands when Auber first boarded the train; Judson is sure that
he did so when he stepped across the aisle to ask about me. Yet, I tell
you that would have made no difference; let him have been as impalpable
as the very air of the car, those men would have felt the flesh, just as
William felt his silver dollar. "Fulfilment of sure expectation on the
ground of countless identical experiences," your psychologist would
explain. Illusion and fact were indistinguishable; and though I happened
to watch the facts, and the others the illusion, their testimony is as
good as mine.

There is the testimony of four men that, when the smash came, they saw
him thrown from his seat, head first, into the window-jamb, and lie for
a moment half through the shattered pane. Just before this, he had taken
out his watch. Its familiar picture-face, and also its enamelled hands
exactly together at twelve o'clock, had caught Ezekiel's eye. He said
that Auber looked at the watch, and then leaned forwar