A CASE OF METAPHANTASMIA


The stranger was a guest of Halson's, and Halson himself was a
comparative stranger, for he was of recent election to our dining-club,
and was better known to Minver than to the rest of our little group,
though one could not be sure that he was very well known to Minver. The
stranger had been dining with Halson, and we had found the two smoking
together, with their cups of black coffee at their elbows, before the
smouldering fire in the Turkish room when we came in from dinner--my
friend Wanhope the psychologist, Rulledge the sentimentalist, Minver the
painter, and myself. It struck me for the first time that a fire on the
hearth was out of keeping with a Turkish room, but I felt that the cups
of black coffee restored the lost balance in some measure.

Before we had settled into our wonted places--in fact, almost as we
entered--Halson looked over his shoulder and said: "Mr. Wanhope, I want
you to hear this story of my friend's. Go on, Newton--or, rather, go
back and begin again--and I'll introduce you afterwards."

The stranger made a becoming show of deprecation. He said he did not
think the story would bear immediate repetition, or was even worth
telling once, but, if we had nothing better to do, perhaps we might do
worse than hear it; the most he could say for it was that the thing
really happened. He wore a large, drooping, gray mustache, which, with
the imperial below it, quite hid his mouth, and gave him, somehow, a
martial effect, besides accurately dating him of the period between the
latest sixties and earliest seventies, when his beard would have been
black; I liked his mustache not being stubbed in the modern manner, but