m me of a certain relation of modes which I should never
have discovered of myself, and could hardly have learned from any one
else."

"Would you mind telling me all about that?" I said.

"By no means--as much at least as I am able: there are not such things
as wilful secrets," he answered--and went on.

"That closet held his library--a hundred manuscripts or so, for printing
was not then invented. One morning I sat there, working at a catalogue
of them, when he looked in at the door, and said, 'Come.' I laid down my
pen and followed him--across the great hall, down a steep rough descent,
and along an underground passage to a tower he had lately built,
consisting of a stair and a room at the top of it. The door of this room
had a tremendous lock, which he undid with the smallest key I ever saw.
I had scarcely crossed the threshold after him, when, to my eyes, he
began to dwindle, and grew less and less. All at once my vision seemed
to come right, and I saw that he was moving swiftly away from me. In a
minute more he was the merest speck in the distance, with the tops
of blue mountains beyond him, clear against a sky of paler blue. I
recognised the country, for I had gone there and come again many a time,
although I had never known this way to it.

"Many years after, when the tower had long disappeared, I taught one of
his descendants what Sir Upward had taught me; and now and then to this
day I use your house when I want to go the nearest way home. I must
indeed--without your leave, for which I ask your pardon--have by this
time well established a right of way through it--not from front to back,
but from bottom to top!"

"You would have me then understand, Mr. Raven," I said, "that you go
through my house into another world, heedless of disparting space?"

"That I go through it is an incontrovertible acknowledgement of space,"
returned the old librarian.

"Please do not quibble, Mr. Raven," I rejoined. "Please to take my
question as you know I mean it."

"There is in your house a door, one step through which carries me into a
world very much another than this."

"A better?"

"Not throughout; but so much another that most of its physical, and many
of its mental laws are different from those of this world. As for moral
laws, they must everywhere be fundamentally the same."

"You try my power of belief!" I said.

"You take me for a madman, probably?"

"You do not look like one."

"A liar then?"

"You gi