I

There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with
none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice
in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange
that the world catches its breath--and looks the other way! And it was
cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into the
wide-spread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing to
his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of
spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the
strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest.

Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved
to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very soul
of things--and to release a suffering human soul in the process--was
with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed,
after passing strange.

The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can
attach credence--something it can, at least, pretend to explain. The
adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with them an
adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters
obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the
adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. But
dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and the
world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with them,
not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely disturbed.

"Such a thing happened to _that_ man!" it cries--"a commonplace person