called in, he was alive and talking in the bed on which he had
been laid out to wait for the coroner's inquest.

You will naturally ask me what had been the matter with him, and
I might treat you, in reply, to a long theory, plentifully
sprinkled with what the children call hard words. I prefer
telling you that, in this case, cause and effect could not be
satisfactorily joined together by any theory whatever. There are
mysteries in life and the conditions of it which human science
has not fathomed yet; and I candidly confess to you that, in
bringing that man back to existence, I was, morally speaking,
groping haphazard in the dark. I know (from the testimony of the
doctor who attended him in the afternoon) that the vital
machinery, so far as its action is appreciable by our senses,
had, in this case, unquestionably stopped, and I am equally
certain (seeing that I recovered him) that the vital principle
was not extinct. When I add that he had suffered from a long and
complicated illness, and that his whole nervous system was
utterly deranged, I have told you all I really know of the
physical condition of my dead-alive patient at the Two Robins
Inn.

When he "came to," as the phrase goes, he was a startling object
to look at, with his colorless face, his sunken cheeks, his wild
black eyes, and his long black hair. The first question he asked
me about himself when he could speak made me suspect that I had
been called in to a man in my own profession. I mentioned to him
my surmise, and he told me that I was right.

He said he had come last from Paris, where he had been attached