a nail's breadth off the Bible truth. He told me how he had been
killed--he went down into a London basement with a candle to look
for a leakage of gas--and described himself as a senior English
master in a London private school when that release occurred."

"Poor wretch!" said I.

"That's what I thought, and the more he talked the more I thought it.
There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked
of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever
been anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive,
too nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood
him, he said. He had never had a real friend in the world,
I think; he had never had a success. He had shirked games and failed
examinations. 'It's like that with some people,' he said; 'whenever
I got into the examination-room or anywhere everything seemed to go.'
Engaged to be married of course--to another over-sensitive person, I
suppose--when the indiscretion with the gas escape ended his affairs.
'And where are you now?' I asked. 'Not in--?'

"He wasn't clear on that point at all. The impression he gave me was
of a sort of vague, intermediate state, a special reserve for souls
too non-existent for anything so positive as either sin or virtue.
_I_ don't know. He was much too egotistical and unobservant to give
me any clear idea of the kind of place, kind of country, there is on
the Other Side of Things. Wherever he was, he seems to have fallen in
with a set of kindred spirits: ghosts of weak Cockney young men,
who were on a footing of Christian names, and among these there was
certainly a lot of talk about 'going haunting' and things like that.
Yes--going haunting! They seemed to think 'haunting' a tremendous