existence. There was a broken old paling hard by; I tore off a
long plank, waded in as near as I dared, and, by help of the plank, after
a good deal of slipping, which involved an exemplary drenching, I
succeeded in getting him on to dry land. He was a distressing
spectacle--his body and face all blackened with the slimy peat-mud; and
he fell half-fainting on the grass, convulsed by a terrible cough. My
first care was to give him whiskey, by perhaps a mistaken impulse of
humanity; my next, as he lay, exhausted, was to bring water in my hat,
and remove the black mud from his face.

Then I saw Percy Allen--Allen of St. Jude's! His face was wasted, his
thin long beard (he had not worn a beard of old), clogged as it was with
peat-stains, showed flecks of grey.

"Allen--Percy!" I said; "what wind blew _you_ here?"

But he did not answer; and, as he coughed, it was too plain that the
shock of his accident had broken some vessel in the lungs. I tended him
as well as I knew how to do it. I sat beside him, giving him what
comfort I might, and all the time my memory flew back to college days,
and to our strange and most unhappy last meeting, and his subsequent
inevitable disgrace. Far away from here--Loch Nan and the vacant
moors--my memory wandered.

It was at Blocksby's auction-room, in a street near the Strand, on the
eve of a great book-sale three years before, that we had met, for almost
the last time, as I believed, though it is true that we had not spoken on
that occasion. It is necessary that I should explain what occurred, or
what I and three other credible witnesses believed to have occurred; for,
upon my word, the more I see and hear of human evidence of any event, the
less do I regard it as establishing anything better than an excessively
probable hypothesis.

To make a long story as short as may be, I should say that Allen and I
had been acquainted when we were undergraduates; that, when fellows of
our respective colleges, our acquaintance had become intimate; that we
had once shared a little bit of fishing on the Test; and that we were
both book-collectors. I was a comparatively sane bibliomaniac, but to
Allen the time came when he grudged every penny that he did not spend on
rare books, and when he actually gave up his share of the water we used
to take together, that his contribution to the rent might go for rare
editions and bindings. After this deplorable change of character we
naturally saw each