insignificant individual with a purely local repute. Or it may have been
that the pictures which they showed me when under the influence of
the fumes of their "tobacco"--or of their hypnotism--took an undue
possession of my brain.

Or lastly, the strange coincidence that the beautiful betrothed of my
host should have related to me a tale of her childhood of which she
declared she had never spoken before, and that within an hour the two
principal actors in that tale should have appeared before my eyes and
hers (for I may state that from the beginning I had no doubt that
they were the same men), moved me and filled me with quite natural
foreboding. Or all these things together may have tended to a
concomitant effect. At any rate the issue was that I could not sleep.

For hour after hour I lay thinking and in an irritated way listening for
the chimes of the Ragnall stable-clock which once had adorned the tower
of the church and struck the quarters with a damnable reiteration. I
concluded that Messrs. Harût and Marût were a couple of common Arab
rogues such as I had seen performing at the African ports. Then a
quarter struck and I concluded that the elephants' cemetery which I
beheld in the smoke undoubtedly existed and that I meant to collar those
thousands of pounds' worth of ivory before I died. Then after another
quarter I concluded that there was no elephants' cemetery--although by
the way my old friend, Dogeetah or Brother John, had mentioned such
a thing to me--but that probably there was a tribe, as he had also
mentioned, called the Kendah, who worshipped a baby, or rather its
effigy.

Well now, as had already occurred to me, the old Egyptians, of whom I
was always fond of reading when I got a chance, also worshipped a child,