a touch of my hand? Or shall I leave 'a sable score of
fingers four' burned on the table? Something of that sort is usually
done."

"Oh, _pray_ don't take the trouble," I said. "I'm sure Lady Perilous
would not like to have the table injured, and she might not altogether
believe my explanation. As for myself, I'll be content with your word
for it that you were really here. Can I bury your bones for you, or
anything? Very well, as you _must_ be off, good night!"

"No, thanks," he replied. "By the way, I've had an idea about my
apparitions in disguise. Perhaps it is my 'Unconscious Self' that does
them. You have read about the 'Unconscious Self' in the Spectator?"

Then he really went.

A nun in grey, who moaned and wrung her hands, remained in the room for a
short time, but was obviously quite automatic.

I slept till the hot water was brought in the morning.

THE GREAT GLADSTONE MYTH. {283}

In the post-Christian myths of the Teutonic race settled in England, no
figure appears more frequently and more mysteriously than that of
Gladstone or Mista Gladstone. To unravel the true germinal conception of
Gladstone, and to assign to all the later accretions of myth their
provenance and epoch, are the problems attempted in this chapter. It is
almost needless (when we consider the perversity of men and the lasting
nature of prejudice) to remark that some still see in Gladstone a shadowy
historical figure. Just as our glorious mythical Bismarck has been
falsely interpreted as the shadowy traditional Arminius (the Arminius of
Tacitus, not of Leo Adolescens), projected on the mists of the Brocken,
so Gladstone has been recognized as a human hero of the Fourth Dynasty.
In this capacity he has been identified with Gordon (probably the north
wind), with Spurgeon, {284} whom I have elsewhere shown to be a river
god, and with Livingstone. In the last case the identity of the suffix
"stone," and the resemblance of the ideas of "joy" and of "vitality,"
lend some air of speciousness to a fundamental error. Livingstone is
ohne zweifel, a mythical form of the midnight sun, now fabled to wander
in the "Dark Continent," as Bishop of Natal, the land of the sun's
birthplace, now alluded to as lost in the cloud-land of comparative
mythology. Of all these cobwebs spun by the spiders of sciolism, the
Euhemeristic or Spencerian view--that Gladstone is an historical
personage--has attracted most attention. Unluckily for