Stooping to pick up Jessica's fan, which she had let fall to the
ground, something shining on the tesselated pavement underneath a
group of palms suddenly caught my eye. We had not said a word to one
another; indeed, it was the first evening we had any of us met one
another--that is, unless the thing was not a dream. I picked it up.
The others gathered round me, and when we looked into one another's
eyes we understood: it was a broken wine-cup, a curious goblet of
Bavarian glass. It was the goblet out of which we had all dreamt that
we had drunk."

I have put the story together as it seems to me it must have happened.
The incidents, at all events, are facts. Things have since occurred
to those concerned affording me hope that they will never read it. I
should not have troubled to tell it at all, but that it has a moral.

***

Six persons sat round the great oak table in the wainscoted _Speise
Saal_ of that cosy hostelry, the Kneiper Hof at Konigsberg. It was
late into the night. Under ordinary circumstances they would have
been in bed, but having arrived by the last train from Dantzic, and
having supped on German fare, it had seemed to them discreeter to
remain awhile in talk. The house was strangely silent. The rotund
landlord, leaving their candles ranged upon the sideboard, had wished
them "Gute Nacht" an hour before. The spirit of the ancient house
enfolded them within its wings.

Here in this very chamber, if rumour is to be believed, Emmanuel Kant
himself had sat discoursing many a time and oft. The walls, behind
which for more than forty years the little peak-faced man had thought