that my insanity is the outcome of overmuch brooding upon psychology.
Dreams of the personal identity indeed! Two days ago I was a healthy
youngster, with all life before me; now I am a furious old man, unkempt,
and desperate, and miserable, prowling about a great, luxurious, strange
house, watched, feared, and avoided as a lunatic by everyone about me. And
in London is Elvesham beginning life again in a vigorous body, and with
all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of threescore and ten. He has
stolen my life.

What has happened I do not clearly know. In the study are volumes of
manuscript notes referring chiefly to the psychology of memory, and parts
of what may be either calculations or ciphers in symbols absolutely
strange to me. In some passages there are indications that he was also
occupied with the philosophy of mathematics. I take it he has transferred
the whole of his memories, the accumulation that makes up his personality,
from this old withered brain of his to mine, and, similarly, that he has
transferred mine to his discarded tenement. Practically, that is, he has
changed bodies. But how such a change may be possible is without the range
of my philosophy. I have been a materialist for all my thinking life, but
here, suddenly, is a clear case of man's detachability from matter.

One desperate experiment I am about to try. I sit writing here before
putting the matter to issue. This morning, with the help of a table-knife
that I had secreted at breakfast, I succeeded in breaking open a fairly
obvious secret drawer in this wrecked writing-desk. I discovered nothing
save a little green glass phial containing a white powder. Round the neck
of the phial was a label, and thereon was written this one word,
"_Release_." This may be--is most probably--poison. I can understand
Elvesham placing poison in my way, and I should be sure that it was his
intention so to get rid of the only living witness against him, were it