Indignation raged amongst the friends of the late Professor; violent controversies burst forth in the public prints. The worst passages were denied on the one hand; while Gridd undertook to prove them to the hilt if anybody dared to have the law of him. In fact that famous romance of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” appeared to have been repeated in real life, and arising out of the Parkinson of public enterprise and honourable renown--the scientist, the philanthropist, the great sociologist--there dawned hideously within the pages of Thomas Gridd a nocturnal, subterranean and blackguard Parkinson--a man of deplorable habits and disreputable ideas--a vicious ghoul. Of course this remarkable book sold prodigiously. Thousands of copies were purchased by the libraries alone, and a work so full of pepper and salt for the time being quite eclipsed the sale of popular fiction, of history, travel, verse, and of more amiable and conventional biography. For myself I just lived long enough to see the scoundrel Gridd get a large fortune by his abominable book and then, in the midst of a rather promising literary career, it pleased Providence to remove me from the sub-lunar puppet-show. Overwork and a chill--but all that does not matter, as it has nothing to do with this narrative. All I need say is that I have frankly forgiven the man who finished my last novel for the press and shall meet him without prejudice if ever he comes here. Almost the first person I met in the Elysian Fields of our order (for I am thankful to say that my modest merits entitled me to a place therein) was my old friend Professor Parkinson. He greeted me with good taste and that particular shade of sympathy proper from a happy spectre to the event of my passing in mid-career. Then, after discussing everything and everybody but himself, he said in his humble way: “I know you will pardon my egotism, but I _should_ like to know how the autobiography went.” “Whose?” I asked. “I blush to answer,” he made reply; “but I was thinking of my own.” “No such thing ever appeared,” I told him. “The man Gridd, in whom you trusted--rather foolishly I am afraid--published a biography of you, written by himself; and it has been an enormous and infamous success. I should not have mentioned this, be sure, had not you invited me to do so.” “I left my autobiography complete in his hands,” said the Professor, much concerned. “It was probably a very different work to the one he has published,” I replied. “In fact, not to mince matters, if all or even one half of what the man Gridd has written of you was true, Professor, you wouldn’t be here. He makes you a flagrant scoundrel and worse, for in his pages you appear as the most nauseous, calculating, double-dealing humbug and hypocrite that ever played a public part on earth and deceived mankind.” “This is very disturbing,” said the Professor. “I never thought such baseness was possible. Why, I rescued Thomas Gridd from the gutter when he was a boy!”