Unfolding the newspaper his attention was attracted by the date, at which he gazed in consternation, his eyes riveted to the page. For a moment his head swam, he was unable to believe his own senses. Dropping the sheet and bowing his head upon his hands he went carefully over the past as he now remembered it,--the business on which he had been commissioned to come west; his journey westward; the tragedy in the sleeping-car--he shuddered as the memory of the murderer's face flashed before him with terrible distinctness; his reception at The Pines,--all was as clear as though it had happened but yesterday; it was in August, and this was August, but two years later! Great God! had two years dropped out of his life? Again he recalled his illness, the long agony, the final sinking into oblivion, the strange awakening in perfect health; yes, surely there must be a missing link; but how? where? He rose to re-enter the cabin, and, passing the window, caught a glimpse of his face reflected there; a face like, and yet unlike, his own, and crowned with snow-white hair! In doubt and bewilderment he paced up and down within the cabin, vainly striving to connect these fragmentary parts, to reconcile the present with the past. As he passed and repassed the table covered with manuscript his attention was attracted by an odd-looking volume bound in flexible morocco and containing several hundred pages of written matter. It lay partly open in a conspicuous place, and upon the fly-leaf was written, in large, bold characters,-- "To my Other Self, should he awaken." He could not banish the words from his mind; they drew him with irresistible magnetism. Again and again he read them, until, impelled by some power he could not explain, he seized the volume and, seating himself in the doorway of the cabin, proceeded to examine it. Lifting the fly-leaf, he read the following inscription: "To one from the outer world, whose identity is hidden among the secrets of the past: "With the hope that when the veil is lifted, these pages may assist him in uniting into one perfect whole the strangely disjointed portions of his life, they are inscribed by "JOHN DARRELL." He smiled as he read the name and recalled the circumstances under which he had taken it, but he no longer felt any hesitation regarding the volume in his hands, and he began to read. It was written as a communication from one stranger to another, from the mountain recluse to one of whose life he had not the slightest knowledge; but he knew without doubt that it was addressed to himself, yet written by himself,--that writer and reader were one and the same. For more than two hours he read on and on, deeply absorbed in the tale of that solitary life, his own heart responding to each note of joy or sorrow, of hope or despair, and vibrating to the undertone of loneliness and longing running through it all.