My diaries are rather a help to me here. I find in them quite a number of mentions of Severn, and even of Karelsky. Both men were almost continually in the limelight; if you take up any _Messenger_ of the period the odds are that you will find either a Severn cross-examination or an account of Karelsky's rejuvenation of some illustrious personage. Fleet Street loved them both, the former for the constancy with which he yielded stimulating copy, and the latter for the uncanny accuracy with which he dropped sensations into the very heart of dead periods. I am thinking, of course, of the great Thibetan monastery sensation. Karelsky travelled, apparently, in Thibet, and somehow or other obtained an entrance into an old and inaccessible monastery in which, to his astonishment, he found that his own methods of rejuvenation had been practised for hundreds of years; so that, in fact, many of the monks were actually in their third and fourth centuries! Fleet Street "wrote up" the story in great glee, with maps of Thibet and excerpts from Sven Hedin and Younghusband all complete; but naturally Fleet Street did not believe a single word of it. I remember discussing the matter with Severn at a sort of "house-warming" party I gave at my new rooms overlooking Lincoln's Inn Fields. Somebody said that Karelsky would have made a better journalist than scientist; and I think I answered that from my own professional point of view I would rather he remained a scientist, since as a journalist he would only be one liar amongst so many. Perhaps I said outright that in my opinion he was very little better than a charlatan and an impostor. But Severn shook his head. "Karelsky's more than that," he answered. "I shouldn't have recommended Terry with him if he'd been a mere market-place quack. Of course, there is something of the quack in him, and he's obviously running this Thibetan stuff for his own advertisement.... But I shouldn't like to call anything that Karelsky says an absolute lie. In my opinion he's one of the very few first-class geniuses the world possesses...." "And you really think this story of his----" Severn smiled. "I prefer to express no opinion," he said. "I am far from saying that Karelsky could not, if he wished, tell the most thundering of lies. But in this case ... well, I just don't know. Oddly enough, I met a well-known Harley Street physician only yesterday and he assured me, from his own personal and rather secret knowledge of Thibet, that Karelsky was perfectly right--although, of course, he deplored the sensationalism of it...." And there the matter ended. I have mentioned it to show how impossible I found it to make up my mind about Karelsky. He had been, and remained still, an enigma.