His gurgling laugh surged in Karl’s ears as Hooper awakened him. Steindal and Constantine had not yet reached Sixth Avenue from Broadway ere the two young men in far-away Oxford were eagerly discussing the incidents of the preceding hour and a quarter in New York. For once, the scientific necromancy of Karl’s flights through space failed to enlist all their attention. Hooper, no less than Grier, was thrilled by the thought that his friend had been drawn by some subtle magnetic influence to participate, in many ways save actual presence, in a conclave of such grave significance to a girl whose fortunes already interested them. And it is, perhaps requisite, here and now, to protest against the smile of supercilious incredulity with which some may read of the earnestness betrayed by these youthful collegians. It is a fact of common knowledge that a telephone company, sufficiently enlightened to endeavor to please its customers, has arranged for a board of directors, consisting of three men in New York, two in Baltimore, and one in Philadelphia, to sit in their respective offices, holding the combined receiver and transmitter to ear and mouth, and conduct a board meeting, to all intents and purposes as efficiently as if they were gathered in the same room. Company directors, or others resident in London, Birmingham, and Liverpool, could do exactly the same thing if the British telephone officials did not require an earthquake followed by a month’s deliberation before they would undertake to provide the necessary facilities. It is exceedingly probable that, in a few years, the same instrument which permits speech and hearing over practically unlimited distance will carry a “seeing” apparatus as well. Will the scientific miracle be any the more explicable because a certain quantity of insulated copper wire intervenes between the persons seeing, hearing, and speaking to each other? I am tempted into this disquisition because, as it happens, the direct outcome of the conversations between the two sets of men (than whom the English-speaking world could scarce produce four persons more opposed in personal characteristics) was the introduction of myself, the writer of this memoir, into the affair. Early in life, journalism had taken me to India, where I met Karl’s father. He was a man after my own heart. Many times, when the business of his tea estate brought him to Calcutta, I had dined with him in the “Wilson-’otel,” the strange name by which alone the _gharri-wala_ knows the Great Eastern Hotel, or he had been carried off from the Red Road by me to my own sanctum overlooking Chowringhee and the smooth, tree-dotted _maidàn_ that stretches towards Fort William and the river.