Within the confines of that hidden state rather humorously called “the other world”--as if the worlds numbered no more than two--we enjoy a measure of knowledge which you mundane folks are but now attaining through processes both painful and slow. Thanks to our perfection in a system, towards which your “wireless telegraphy” has already made some distant approach, it is possible for me to tell an interesting tale and cast some light upon a recent literary mystery. Now when that great and good man Professor Peter Parkinson passed out of life, his notable earthly labours very properly entitled him to a resting-place amongst our great ones, and I was among those privileged men of light and leading invited to bear his pall. I remember that I walked next to Thomas Gridd, the little busybody who in life for some obscure reason won Peter Parkinson’s regard, and who was left by the Professor as his literary executor. Even during the solemn moment of sepulchral rites, Gridd found time to speak to me. “The only official and recognised biography will be mine,” he whispered. “Remember that. Tell everybody. It is going to be a great book; and it will surprise some of us not a little.” How those words came back to my mind after the event! Perhaps the most sensational biography of the last century was that by Thomas Gridd of Peter Parkinson. In public life Parkinson had passed for a remarkable man, an original thinker, a live force in ethics, a dynamic power exercised for good, and one who, to speak generally, most surely left his corner of earth better, wiser and cleaner than he found it. His privacy had of course been probed also; and it was pretty generally conceded that no better husband or father than the Professor could well be found. His amusements were pathetically innocent and high-minded; the Athenæum was his only club; when he left England upon a vacation during later life, it was in order that his family might visit the Alps, the French Exhibition of 1900 and other improving and unique phenomena of Nature and the times. Upon a general appreciation of the dead man’s worth and virtue there burst the biography of Thomas Gridd, than which anything more sensational, outrageous and unexpected could not well be imagined. After a great parade of the necessity for Truth, of his own high motives in this matter, and of the abundant grief that his task had brought upon him, the unutterable Gridd set out upon his ruffianly way and exhibited before the amazed and incredulous vision of England the spectacle of a great reputation torn to ribbons.