And you will guess readily what we poor exiles talked of while the ice clinked in the long glasses and the blue smoke-rings of Bangalore cheroots rose to the ceiling. He of his wife and child, I of a deluded girl waiting in England until the rupee recovered from the heat-wave which melted silver--Heavens! How we flung those topics back and forth, like two tennis-players battering a ball. And we never bored each other. Each man was far too thankful to have a sympathetic listener to be weary of the other’s stories. So, in that way, I knew a great deal of Karl, and when, years having passed, and the aforesaid girl (the rupee having long since steadied itself at 1_s._ 4_d._) being gone to visit her mother in Devonshire with our young hopeful, I decided to indulge in a long deferred trip to Oxford, it was only natural that I should seek out the son of my old Indian crony, and ask him to guide my steps along the ancient paths of “the home of lost causes and impossible beliefs.” The odd thing was that no man in Britain was more prepared to give credence to Karl’s “visions” than myself. I had long since read Sir William Macpherson’s book, and constructed Frank Hooper’s theory of the definite bounds of human inventiveness out of my own thought-producing laboratory. “Blut ist ein ganz besondrer saft!” said old Mephisto, when he wheedled Faust into signing his soul away with his own blood, and the same “peculiar juice” of the Celtic stream ran in Grier’s veins and in my own. Moreover, Grier _père_ had told me of the adventures of Grier _fils_ in the matter of the Hutchinson Raid and the saving of Constantine, so it was another of the strange coincidences of life that brought a note from me, ensconced in the Mitre Inn, to Karl at his college on the morning after his excursion to Steindal’s office and the Broadway restaurant. Grier and Hooper come to me during the afternoon. Instead of admiring the glories of Oxford, I had the recital of recent events poured into my willing ears as we sat together in my private sitting-room on the first floor. Dear me! how the years slipped back as I listened. The rounded tree-tops and gracious spires of the English University town did not differ so greatly from the dim outlines of the palatial city on the left bank of the Hughli. What a mere hand-span is a vanished decade! The magic carpet of Tangu, which instantaneously transported its possessor whither he wished to go, was not a more wonderful vehicle than a man’s memory. And Karl, even thus early in life, had a way of talking that compelled attention. He spoke to the point, in simple words. Evidently he had a horror of exaggeration. His explanations were clear, logical, as a proposition of Euclid, and he was hardly ever at a loss for a simile when illustrating one of the less easily understood features of his new and extraordinary force.