myself that there was no mistake, I laid the banjo across my knees, and
stared at my friend in bewilderment. He sat smoking with a kind of grim
composure, his eyes fixed upon the blazing logs.

"I'm mystified, I confess," said I. "Come; what is the joke? What
method have you discovered of producing the decay of centuries on this
unfortunate banjo in a few months? And why did you do it? I have heard
of an elixir to counteract the effects of time, but your recipe seems
to work the other way--to make time rush forward at two hundred times
his usual rate, in one place, while he jogs on at his usual gait
elsewhere. Unfold your mystery, magician. Seriously, Ken, how on earth
did the thing happen?"

"I know no more about it than you do," was his reply. "Either you and I
and all the rest of the living world are insane, or else there has been
wrought a miracle as strange as any in tradition. How can I explain it?
It is a common saying--a common experience, if you will--that we may,
on certain trying or tremendous occasions, live years in one moment.
But that's a mental experience, not a physical one, and one that
applies, at all events, only to human beings, not to senseless things
of wood and metal. You imagine the thing is some trick or jugglery. If
it be, I don't know the secret of it. There's no chemical appliance
that I ever heard of that will get a piece of solid wood into that
condition in a few months, or a few years. And it wasn't done in a few
years, or a few months either. A year ago today at this very hour that
banjo was as sound as when it left the maker's hands, and twenty-four
hours afterward--I'm telling you the simple truth--it was as you see it
now."

The gravity and earnestness with which Ken made this astounding