like that! It is too absurd! There must be something wrong!"

Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to
little Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to Dr.
Silence. Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in spite
of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed wisely
that "such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that crack-brained
Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never have happened to
commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to live and die
according to scale."

But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not "live
according to scale" so far as this particular event in his otherwise
uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch his
pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and more
hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his halting
words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing over again
each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled in the
recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became a
lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to
excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so
fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive
soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and almost
constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that should
rightly have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly remote
from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an umbrella
on an omnibus. And when this curious event came upon him he was already
more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he cared to admit.

John Silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once, said