itudes of the blue sky; water,
rocks, and trees his only living testament. Under his tutelage, with the
eyes of Doctor Mach ever on his growing body, and with his own special
gifts of concentration and perception, at last came to Gargoyle the
sudden whisper of academic sanction--namely, "genius."

He himself seemed never to hear this whisper. What things--superimposed
on the new teeming world of material actualities--he _did_ hear, he
never told. Few could reach Berber; among fellow-students he was gay,
amiable, up to a certain point even frivolous; then, as each companion
in turn complained, a curtain seemed to drop, a colorless wrap of
unintelligibility enveloped him like a chameleon's changing skin; the
youth, as if he lived another life on another plane, walked apart.

Doctor Milton, dropping into the smoking-room of a popular confrA"re, got
a whiff of the prevailing gossip about his protA(C)gA(C).

"I'll be hanged if I can associate psychics with a biceps like Berber's;
somehow those things seem the special prerogative of anemic women in
white cheese-cloth fooling with 'planchette' and 'currents.'"

"You've got another guess," a growling neurologist volunteered. "Why
shouldn't psychic freaks have biceps? We keep forgetting that we've
dragged our fifty-year-old carcasses into an entirely new age--a
wireless, horseless, man-flying, star-chasing age. Why, after shock upon
shock of scientific discovery, shouldn't the human brain, like a
sensitive plate, be thinned down to keener, more sensitive,
perceptions?"

Some one remarked that in the case of Berber, born of a simple country
woman and her uneducated husband, this was impossible.

Another man laughed. "Berber may be a Martian, or perhaps he was
originally destined to be the first man on Jupiter. He took the wrong
car and landed on this globe. Why not? How do we know what agency
carries pollen of human life from planet to planet?"

Milton, smiling at it all, withdrew. He sat down and wrote a
long-deferred letter to Mrs. Strang.

I have asked John Berber if he would care to revisit his old home.
It seemed never to have occurred to him that he _had_ a home! When
I suggested the thing he followed it up eagerly, as he does every
new idea, asking me many keen questions as to his relatives, who
had paid for his education, etc. Of the actual facts of his cure he
knows little except that there was special functioning out of gear,