And now arose one of the most sinister concatenations easily to be conceived in the life of a respectable citizen. Here was I on the brink of self-destruction; I only waited for some fellow-creature to restrain me. _But nobody attempted to do so!_ My folly in disguising the truth from the little rope-merchant now appeared. Had he known, he had doubtless shown me my dreadful error in time; now it was too late; his only advice--sound undoubtedly--had been not to bungle it. The world pursued its own business quite regardless of me and my black secret and my hidden rope. Apparently there was really nothing for me to do but to lose my wager or hang myself--an alternative which I well knew would represent for my family a total pecuniary loss considerably greater than the sum involved. I wandered down a lonely court and found an archway at the bottom. One sickly gas-lamp gleamed above this spot, and the silence of death reigned within it. Had I been in sober earnest, no nook hidden away under the huge pall of the fog could have suited me better. Some evil fiend had apparently taken charge of my volition and designed to see the matter through, for I pursued this business of hanging with a callous deliberation that amazed me. I even smiled as I climbed up the arch and made the rope fast upon the lamp above it. Not a soul came to interrupt. The lamp blinked lazily, the fog crowded closer to see the sight, the fiend busied himself with my Jubbulpore rope and arranged all preliminaries, while I sat and grinned over the sooty desolation. I felt my pulse calmly, critically; I indulged in mental analysis, endeavoured to estimate my frame of mind, and wondered if I could throw the experience into literary form for a scientific journal. I remember being particularly surprised that the attitude of my intellect towards this performance was untinctured by any religious feeling whatsoever. Then came a psychological moment when the fiend had done everything that he could for me. My task was merely to tie the loose end of the Jubbulpore masterpiece round my neck and cast forth into the void. How strange a thing is memory! For some extraordinary reason a famous definition of fishing flashed into my mind. I could not recall it exactly at that terrible moment, but I remembered how it had to do with a fool at one end of a piece of string.