cloth and she answer from below. They could see each other quite
plainly with their field glasses, and they might have been in different
planets for all their chance of meeting."

"And one at last died," says the outsider.

"No, sir. I'm sorry not to be able to clinch the story, but the man
recovered and is now a successful stockbroker in Drapers Gardens. The
woman, too, is the mother of a considerable family. But what are you
doing there?"

"Only taking a note or two of your talk."

The three medical men laugh as they walk towards their overcoats.

"Why, we've done nothing but talk shop," says the general practitioner.
"What possible interest can the public take in that?"

LOT NO. 249.

Of the dealings of Edward Bellingham with William Monkhouse Lee, and of
the cause of the great terror of Abercrombie Smith, it may be that no
absolute and final judgment will ever be delivered. It is true that we
have the full and clear narrative of Smith himself, and such
corroboration as he could look for from Thomas Styles the servant, from
the Reverend Plumptree Peterson, Fellow of Old's, and from such other
people as chanced to gain some passing glance at this or that incident
in a singular chain of events. Yet, in the main, the story must rest
upon Smith alone, and the most will think that it is more likely that
one brain, however outwardly sane, has some subtle warp in its texture,
some strange flaw in its workings, than that the path of Nature has
been overstepped in open day in so famed a centre of learning and light
as the University of Oxford. Yet when we think how narrow and how
devious this path of Nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our
lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great
and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and
confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-paths into which
the human spirit may wander.

In a certain wing of what we will call Old College in Oxford there is a
corner turret of an exceeding great age. The heavy arch which spans
the open door has bent downwards in the centre under the weight of its
years, and the grey, lichen-blotched blocks of stone are, bound and
knitted together with withes and strands of ivy, as though the old
mother had set herself to brace them up against wind and weather. From
the door a stone stair curves upward spirally, passing two landings,
and terminating in a third one, its st