explanation of the coming fever is far more satisfactory and
scientific; but the other keeps recurring—a curious experience
anyhow.

"If you have nothing to do you might write me a line to Stockholm,
Poste Restante. I am going north to have a look at the ice.
Altogether, what with the East still open before me, I do not expect
to come home for two or three years.

"You are one of the few friends I can rely upon, so I carry about
with me a letter addressed to you; in case of my death you will be
the first to be notified of the fact.

"Ever yours,
"Arthur Hamilton."

I have given this letter in full, because it affords a good example
of Arthur's descriptive style, which always struck me as being vivid
and graphic, and also because this little incident, not by the proof
it itself afforded, but by the turn it gave his thoughts—then rather
rapidly drifting into materialism—was the first step in a kind of
conversion from the purely physical views of life he had been apt to
take. The episode itself, too, is a curious one, and may deserve to
be recorded.




CHAPTER VI