I feel greatly embarrassed in narrating my friend's adventure, but I have begged his pardon beforehand, and he knows how unselfish my aims are. Besides, as he has related his troubles to everyone who would listen to them, without having deposed to the facts under a seal of secrecy, I have only to play the rôle of an impartial chronicler, and if I am looked at askance on account of that it is I who pay the penalty. My friend is an atheist and materialist, but enjoys the life which he despises, and fears death, which he does not know. At the beginning of our acquaintanceship, when he offered me a refuge in his house, he treated me with friendly brotherliness, and tended me like a sick person, that is to say, with the considerate sympathy of an intelligent free-thinker who understands mental disorders, and the indulgent treatment which they require. But even a freethinker may have his dark hours of depression, the cause of which he knows not. Late one evening, when the room was in twilight, and the lamps, though kindled, did not illuminate the corners where the shadows fell, my friend confided to me, in answer to my expressions of gratitude, that the obligation lay on his side. For he had, he said, a short while ago lost his best friend by death. Since then he was troubled by uneasy dreams, in which there always mixed the image of his departed friend. "You also?" I exclaimed. "I also! But you understand that I am only speaking of dreams such as one has at night." "Yes, certainly." "Sleeplessness, nightmares, and so forth. You know what it is to be ridden by a nightmare, which is a disorder of the chest caused by disturbed digestion following on excesses. Have you never had it?" "Yes, indeed. One eats crabs for supper, and then one has it! Have you tried sulphonal for it?" "Yes. But as to trusting doctors--you know yourself already, perhaps?" "I should think so! I know them thoroughly. But let us speak of your dead friend. Does he appear to you in a disturbing way,--I mean in dreams?" "I need hardly tell you it isn't he who appears before me. It is his corpse, and I am sorry to say he died under strange circumstances. Only think! A young talented man who had made a very promising début in literature must die of an obscure disease, tuberculosis miliaris, which caused his body to so decompose that it looked like a heap of millet." "And now his body appears to you?" "You don't understand what I mean. Let us drop the subject." * * * * * With his health shaken and his moods as varying as April weather, my friend seems to suffer from an acute degree of nervousness. When I part from him in February, he will never go alone to his house after sunset.