fiction; it is from their impatience of what seems to be that springs
their curiosity of what _is_. Clio is their muse, and she alone. Their
whole lust is to gather knowledge through a hole, their whole faculty
is to _peep_. But they are destitute of imagination, and do not lie; in
their passion for realities they would esteem it a sacrilege to distort
history. They make straight for the substantial, the indubitable. For
this reason the Peniculi and Ergasili of Plautus seem to me far more
true to nature than the character of Paul Pry in Jerrold's comedy. In
one instance, indeed, the evidence of Hester Dyett appears, on the
surface of it, to be quite false. She declares that she sees a round
white object moving upward in the room. But the night being gloomy, her
taper having gone out, she must have been standing in a dense darkness.
How then could she see this object? Her evidence, it was argued, must
be designedly false, or else (as she was in an ecstatic condition) the
result of an excited fancy. But I have stated that such persons,
nervous, neurotic even as they may be, are not fanciful. I therefore
accept her evidence as true. And now, mark the consequence of that
acceptance. I am driven to admit that there must, from some source,
have been light in the room--a light faint enough, and diffused enough,
to escape the notice of Hester herself. This being so, it must have
proceeded from around, from below, or from above. There are no other
alternatives. Around these was nothing but the darkness of the night;
the room beneath, we know, was also in darkness. The light then came
from the room above--from the mechanic class-room. But there is only
one possible means by which the light from an upper can diffuse a lower
room. It _must_ be by a hole in the intermediate boards. We are thus
driven to the discovery of an aperture of some sort in the flooring of
that upper chamber. Given this, the mystery of the round white object
"driven" upward disappears. We at once ask, why not _drawn_ upward
through the newly-discovered aperture by a string too small to be