I never knew why he left that strange request that his papers should be sent to me; nor was there any message among them, or the least indication of what he wanted me to do with them. Most of them were concerned with the life of Attila, but there were not three properly finished chapters; and the mass of fragments, quotations, references, tentative notes, mutually destructive and unresolved conjectures, baffled my utmost endeavours, and remained for me, and I fear must always remain, so much lost labour, like an enigma of which the key is missing. But in the midst of these papers, thrust as if hurriedly into one of the bundles, so that the string had cut into the outer leaves of loose manuscripts, there was a thin book bound in parchment, almost filled with Luxulyan's close, uneasy writing. It was a journal, many times begun and relinquished, ending with a date not many days before his death. Between the pages were two letters, in a woman's handwriting. I burnt the letters without reading them; then I read the journal. What I print here is printed with but few omissions; only I have changed the names, and not left any allusion, as far as I know, to circumstances which it is likely that any one could easily identify. For the omissions I make myself wholly responsible; as, indeed, for the printing of the journal at all. It seems to me a genuine document; odd, disconcerting, like the man who wrote it; profoundly disconcerting to me, on reading it, as I discovered the real subterranean being whom I had known, during his lifetime, only by a few, scarcely perceptible outlines on the surface. Such as it is, I give it here, reserving till afterwards something more which I shall have to say by way of comment or epilogue. * * * * * April 5.--I have been talking with the doctor to-day, and he tells me that my nerves are seriously out of order. There, of course, he is quite right, and he tells me nothing I did not know already. Only, why tell me? That is just what it does me no good to think about. If I am to keep in even so shaky an equilibrium as this, which at least might be worse, it is essential for me to forget there is any danger. What folly, to be a doctor and honest!