st complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest.

Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved
to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very soul
of things--and to release a suffering human soul in the process--was
with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed,
after passing strange.

The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can
attach credence--something it can, at least, pretend to explain. The
adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with them an
adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters
obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the
adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. But
dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and the
world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with them,
not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely disturbed.

"Such a thing happened to _that_ man!" it cries--"a commonplace person
like that! It is too absurd! There must be something wrong!"

Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to
little Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to Dr.
Silence. Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in spite
of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed wisely
that "such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that crack-brained
Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never have happened to
commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to live and die
according to scale."

But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not "live
according to scale" so far as this particular event in his otherwise
uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch his
pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and more
hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his halting
words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing over again
each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled in the
recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became a
lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to
excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so
fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive
soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man a