him, anyway--may have jolted him pretty hard. But if
he aimed to go inside he changed his mind when he got to the door. He
turned round and came back.

"'Yes,' he says, as though the words were being dragged out of him
against his will, 'I did once know a man of that name. He was commonly
called Ham Bledsoe. He lived near where'--he checked himself up,
here--'he lived,' he says, 'in this county at one time. I knew him
then.'

"'That being so,' I says, 'I judge the proper thing to do is to ask you
to read these galley proofs,' and I handed them over and he read them
through without a word. Without a word, mind you, and yet if he'd spoken
a volume he couldn't have told me any clearer what was passing through
his mind when he came to the main facts than the way he did tell me just
by the look that came into his face. Gentlemen, when you sit and watch a
man sixty-odd years old being born again; when you see hope and life
come back to him all in a minute; when you see his soul being remade in
a flash, you'll find you can't describe it afterwards, but you're never
going to forget it. And another thing you'll find is that there is
nothing for you to say to him, nothing that you can say, nor nothing
that you want to say.

"I did manage, when he was through, to ask him whether or not he wished
to make a statement. That was all from me, mind you, and yet I'd gone
out there with the idea in my head of getting material for a long newsy
piece out of him--what we call in this business heart-interest stuff.
All he said, though, as he handed me back the slips was, 'No, sir; but I
thank you--from the bottom of my heart I thank you.' And then he shook
hands with me--shook hands with me like a man who's forgotten almost how
'twas done--and he walked in his house and shut the door behind him, and
I came on away feeling exactly as though I had seen a funeral turned
into a resurrection."

Editor Tompkins thought he had that day written the final chapter, but
he hadn't. The final chapter he was to write the next day, following
hard upon a denouement, which to Mr. Tompkins, he with his own eyes
having seen what he had seen, was so profound a puzzle that ever
thereafter he mentally catalogued it under one of his favorite
headlining phrases: "Deplorable Affair Shrouded in Mystery."

Let us go back a few hours. For a fact, Mr. Tompkins had been witness to
a spirit's resurrection. It was as he had borne testimony--a life had
been reborn bef