ones. I carried them up to my room in my hotel: with them I brought up
a pork pie and dozens and dozens of doughnuts. I ate the pie and the
doughnuts, then sat back in the bed and read the comic papers one after
the other. Finally, as I felt the awful lethargy stealing upon me, I
reached out my hand for the _London Weekly Times_, and held up the
editorial page before my eye.

It was, in a way, clear, straight suicide, but I did it.

I could feel my senses leaving me. In the room across the hall there
was a man singing. His voice, that had been loud, came fainter and
fainter through the transom. I fell into a sleep, the deep
immeasurable sleep in which the very existence of the outer world was
hushed. Dimly I could feel the days go past, then the years, and then
the long passage of the centuries.

Then, not as it were gradually, but quite suddenly, I woke up, sat up,
and looked about me.

Where was I?

Well might I ask myself.

I found myself lying, or rather sitting up, on a broad couch. I was
in a great room, dim, gloomy, and dilapidated in its general
appearance, and apparently, from its glass cases and the stuffed
figures that they contained, some kind of museum.

Beside me sat a man. His face was hairless, but neither old nor
young. He wore clothes that looked like the grey ashes of paper that