immering hollow looks as if
it were the beginning of eternity. It must be eerie to live with the
feeling always on one."

Leithen seemed disinclined for further exercise. He lit a pipe and
smoked quietly for a little. "Odd that you didn't know Hollond. You
must have heard his name. I thought you amused yourself with
metaphysics."

Then I remembered. There had been an erratic genius who had written
some articles in Mind on that dreary subject, the mathematical
conception of infinity. Men had praised them to me, but I confess I
never quite understood their argument. "Wasn't he some sort of
mathematical professor?" I asked.

"He was, and, in his own way, a tremendous swell. He wrote a book on
Number which has translations in every European language. He is dead
now, and the Royal Society founded a medal in his honour. But I wasn't
thinking of that side of him."

It was the time and place for a story, for the pony would not be back
for an hour. So I asked Leithen about the other side of Hollond which
was recalled to him by Correi na Sidhe. He seemed a little unwilling
to speak...

"I wonder if you will understand it. You ought to, of course, better
than me, for you know something of philosophy. But it took me a long
time to get the hang of it, and I can't give you any kind of
explanation. He was my fag at Eton, and when I began to get on at the
Bar I was able to advise him on one or two private matters, so that he
rather fancied my legal ability. He came to me with his story because
he had to tell someone, and he wouldn't trust a colleague. He said he
didn't want a scientist to know, for scientists were either pledged to
their own theories and wouldn't understand, or, if they understood,
would get ahead of him in his researches. He wanted a lawyer, he said,
who was accustomed to weighing evidence. That was good sense, for
evidence must always be judged by the same laws, and I suppose in the
long-run the most abstruse business comes down to a fairly simple
deduction from certain data. Anyhow, that was the way he used to talk,
and I listened to him, for I liked the man, and had an enormous respect
for his brains. At Eton he sluiced down all the mathematics they could
give him, and he was an astonishing swell at Cambridge. He was a
simple fellow, too, and talked no more jargon than he could help. I
used to climb with him in the Alps now and then, and you would never
have guessed that he had any t