These quartos were, in fine, the books which had made Gerald Musgrave the most famous and widely read of American ethnologists; and by his body’s industry and erudition and broad-mindedness Gerald was properly impressed. Here seemed, indeed, to be at least one complete and scholarly treatise devoted to the historical development and the mechanics and the literature of every known manifestation of the great forces which had created all life. “Yes, it is really edifying to note with what zeal and common-sense my body—while I was a-gypsying with over-ambitious follies,—has decorously set up as the recorder of historical and scientific truths.” Then Gerald found upon the next shelf some fourteen tall scrapbooks. They were full of what the newspapers had printed in laudation and in the most respectful criticism of the books of Gerald Musgrave. They contained, also, accounts of the academic honors conferred upon Gerald Musgrave. They were interleaved with the letters which had been written—the majority, of course, by that strange race which writes habitually to authors, but many of them, apparently, by persons of some consequence,—to Gerald Musgrave about his books. “My body in my absence has become, thanks to my body’s books, a reputable and even a looked-up-to citizen. My body is by way of being, indeed, a personage. I note, too, with that interest appropriate to the foibles of the great, that my body has also become a somewhat vain old magpie, gathering up through thirty years every scrap of paper which happens to display my name.” Next Gerald lighted on a black box with silver corners, and inside it was a time-discolored manuscript. This Gerald carried to the writing-table. And he found it that unfinished romance about his heroic ancestor, Dom Manuel of Poictesme, just ninety-three pages of it, precisely as Gerald had left it, with no word changed or added. “There was not in my natural body sufficient power to sustain the high inspiration of my youth. So, very sensibly, my body has found other pursuits, and through them it has become a personage. I do not complain. Not every body becomes a personage. Even so, it seems a pity to have denied to mankind the loveliness already created in this fragment.” But it was just then that the door opened. In the doorway stood a man in late middle life. And Gerald now for one instant regarded his natural body and all the dilapidations which time had performed upon that body.