self-exposure, become the possible confidant. He had been bitten
by the desire to show that he, too, had lived and felt many things,
and the fever was upon him.

He was certainly confoundedly allusive at first, and my eagerness
to clear him up with a few precise questions was only equalled
and controlled by my anxiety not to get to this sort of thing too soon.
But in another meeting or so the basis of confidence was complete;
and from first to last I think I got most of the items and aspects--
indeed, I got quite a number of times over almost everything that
Mr. Skelmersdale, with his very limited powers of narration, will
ever be able to tell. And so I come to the story of his adventure,
and I piece it all together again. Whether it really happened,
whether he imagined it or dreamt it, or fell upon it in some strange
hallucinatory trance, I do not profess to say. But that he invented
it I will not for one moment entertain. The man simply and honestly
believes the thing happened as he says it happened; he is transparently
incapable of any lie so elaborate and sustained, and in the belief
of the simple, yet often keenly penetrating, rustic minds about him
I find a very strong confirmation of his sincerity. He believes--
and nobody can produce any positive fact to falsify his belief.
As for me, with this much of endorsement, I transmit his story--
I am a little old now to justify or explain.

He says he went to sleep on Aldington Knoll about ten o'clock one
night--it was quite possibly Midsummer night, though he has never
thought of the date, and he cannot be sure within a week or so--
and it was a fine night and windless, with a rising moon. I have been
at the pains to visit this Knoll thrice since his story grew up
under my persuasions, and once I went there in the twilight summer