his
eyes, and he lost all consciousness. For how long he knew not. At last
he felt, rather than saw, the lamp-rays flickering above him, and
opened his eyes as though waking from a tired sleep. Sitting up, he
gave a fearful look around him, as if dreading what he might see. The
drunkard's body lay stretched and motionless beside him, and the clock
marked three. He was saved!

Slipping down from his perilous bed, he resumed the old familiar
garments that belonged to him as Ronald Wyde, shuddering with emotion
as he did so. Only pausing to give one look at the pale heap in the
shadowy corner, and at the other sleeper under the now dying lamp, he
quitted the room and locked its heavy door upon the two silent
guardians of its life-secrets. When he reached the street, he found
the rain had ceased to drop, and that the cold stars blinked over the
slumbrous town.

Before noon he had taken leave of Frau Spritzkrapfen, turned buxom
Lottchen scarlet all over by a hearty, sudden, farewell-kiss, and was
far on his way from Freiberg, with its red-vined balcony and its dark
laboratory, never again to visit it or them. And as the busy engine
toiled and shrieked, and with each beat of its mighty steam-heart
carried him further away, his thoughts flew back and clustered around
witless, brown-eyed birdling. Poor child, he never learned her fate.

* * * * *

I heard this strange story from its hero, one sunny summer morning as
we swept over the meadowy reaches of the Erie Railway, or hung along
the cliffside by the wooded windings of the Susquehanna. When he had
ended it, he smiled languidly, and, showing me his still-mutilated
hand, said that the old doctor's job had been a sad bungle, after all.
In fact, the only physical proof that remained to verify his story,
was a curved blue spot where the ingoing current from the magnet had
carried particles from the carbon point and lodged them beneath the
skin. Psychologically, he was sadly mixed up, he said; for, since that
time, he had felt that four lives were joined in him--his own, the
remnant of Herr Lebensfunke's miserable hoard merged in that of poor
birdling's mother, and, last of all, Hans Kraut's.

He left the cars soon afterward at Binghamton, watchfully followed by
a stout, shabby man with a three days' beard stubbling his chin, who
had occupied the seat in front of us, and had turned now and then to
listen for a moment to Ronald's rapid narrati