loneliness of soul
than a volume of pathetic writing could do, that he told no human being of
his curious observations. He seems to have been living in such an
atmosphere of petty spite that to admit the existence of a pleasure would
have been to risk the loss of it. He found that as the dawn advanced, and
the amount of diffused light increased, the crystal became to all
appearance non-luminous. And for some time he was unable to see anything
in it, except at night-time, in dark corners of the shop.

But the use of an old velvet cloth, which he used as a background for a
collection of minerals, occurred to him, and by doubling this, and putting
it over his head and hands, he was able to get a sight of the luminous
movement within the crystal even in the day-time. He was very cautious
lest he should be thus discovered by his wife, and he practised this
occupation only in the afternoons, while she was asleep upstairs, and then
circumspectly in a hollow under the counter. And one day, turning the
crystal about in his hands, he saw something. It came and went like a
flash, but it gave him the impression that the object had for a moment
opened to him the view of a wide and spacious and strange country; and
turning it about, he did, just as the light faded, see the same vision
again.

Now it would be tedious and unnecessary to state all the phases of Mr.
Cave's discovery from this point. Suffice that the effect was this: the
crystal, being peered into at an angle of about 137 degrees from the
direction of the illuminating ray, gave a clear and consistent picture of
a wide and peculiar country-side. It was not dream-like at all: it
produced a definite impression of reality, and the better the light the
more real and solid it seemed. It was a moving picture: that is to say,
certain objects moved in it, but slowly in an orderly manner like real
things, and, according as the direction of the lighting and vision
changed, the picture changed also. It must, indeed, have been like looking
through an oval glass at a view, and turning the glass about to get at
different aspects.

Mr. Cave's statements, Mr. Wace assures me, were extremely circumstantial,
and entirely free from any of that emotional quality that taints
hallucinatory impressions. But it must be remembered that all the efforts
of Mr. Wace to see any similar clarity in the faint opalescence of the
crystal were wholly unsuccessful, try as he would. The difference in
inte