hat before--stare wide-eyed and entranced, as though
at something wonderful which was hidden from human eyes. Then, still
looking up and to the side, Smokeball trotted over and jumped onto his
lap, but even as he stroked her, she was looking at an invisible
something beside him. At the same time, he had a warm and pleasant
feeling, as of a happy and affectionate presence near him.

"No," he said, slowly and judicially. "That's not just my imagination.
But who--or what--are you?"

"I'm.... Oh, I don't know how to think it so that you'll understand."
The voice inside his head seemed baffled, like a physicist trying to
explain atomic energy to a Hottentot. "I'm not material. If you can
imagine a mind that doesn't need a brain to think with.... Oh, I can't
explain it now! But when I'm talking to you, like this, I'm really
thinking inside your brain, along with your own mind, and you hear the
words without there being any sound. And you just don't know any words
that would express it."

He had never thought much, one way or another, about spiritualism. There
had been old people, when he had been a boy, who had told stories of
ghosts and apparitions, with the firmest conviction that they were true.
And there had been an Irishman, in his old company in the Philippines,
who swore that the ghost of a dead comrade walked post with him when he
was on guard.

"Are you a spirit?" he asked. "I mean, somebody who once lived in a
body, like me?"

"N-no." The voice inside him seemed doubtful. "That is, I don't think
so. I know about spirits; they're all around, everywhere. But I don't
think I'm one. At least, I've always been like I am now, as long as I
can remember. Most spirits don't seem to sense me. I can't reach most
living people, either; their minds are closed to me, or they have such
disgusting minds I can't bear to touch them. Children are open to me,
but when they tell their parents about me, they are laughed at, or
punished for lying, and then they close up against me. You're the first
grown-up person I've been able to reach for a long time."

"Probably getting into my second childhood," Colonel Hampton grunted.

"Oh, but you mustn't be ashamed of that!" the invisible entity told him.
"That's the beginning of real wisdom--becoming childlike again. One of
your religious teachers said something like that, long ago, and a long
time before that, there was a Chinaman whom people called Venerable
Child, because his wisdom h