ou've only
met this evening?" He smiled.

"I am a lonely man, almost a recluse, Mr. Barrett," he answered. "I have
many friends in many countries--but no intimates. It is the penalty of a
man's devotion to one single and absorbing task. And, too, I think you
share a little of my interest in this particular task."

"I do, sir! It has fascinated me," I said.

"Then come along. I shall soon be an old man, and I will need someone to
carry on this work as I should carry it on. Perhaps you will be that
man."

A taxi was coming up the Drive at that moment. Melbourne hailed it, and
held the door for me to enter. Then he gave the driver an address which
I didn't hear, and climbed in after me.

"This will be quicker," he said. "After all, I am more excited about it
myself than I should care to admit."

As we turned and went on up the Drive, he told me more about his
invention.

"I call it the Chamber of Life," he said. "It's a fantastic name, but it
designates precisely what my instrument is.

"You see, it's like living another life to experience an hour or two in
the Chamber. You cannot possibly realize yet just what it's like. I have
created a means of reproducing all the sensations that a man would have
in actual living; all the sounds, the odors, the little feelings that
are half-realized in daily life--everything. The Chamber takes
possession of you and lives for you. You forget your name, your very
existence in this world, and you are taken bodily into a fictitious
land. It is like actually living the books you would read today, or the
motion pictures and plays you would watch and hear.

"It is as real as life, but it moves swiftly as a dream. You seem to
pass through certain things slowly and completely, in the _tempo_ of
life. Then, when the transitional moment comes, between the scenes, your
sensations pass with unbelievable rapidity. The Chamber has possession
of your mind. It tells you that you are doing such and such a thing, it
gives you all the feeling of doing that thing, and you actually believe
you are doing it. And when it snatches you away from one day and takes
you into the next, it has only to make you feel that a day has passed,
and it is as though you had lived through that day. You could live a
lifetime in this way, in the Chamber, without spending actually more
than a few hours."

* * * * *

The taxi turned a corner, leaving the Drive, and plunged into a maze o