Well then, nothing had ever happened to Mr. Thorpe before, and what was the result? Why that this aqueous adventure of his began to grow and possess him as you and I are possessed by our more important feats, by our different distant journeys, our bold speculations, our meeting with grand acquaintances, our outwitting of the law; and I am sorry to say that Mr. Thorpe in a very short time began to lie prodigiously. The symptoms of this perversion first appeared a few days after the accident, at a lunch which he attended (with the other directors of the Marine Glue Company) in the City. The company was in process of negotiating a very difficult piece of business, that required all the attention of the directors, and, as is usual under such circumstances, they fell to telling amusing tales to one another. One of them had just finished his story of how a nephew of his narrowly escaped lynching at Leadville, Colorado, when Mr. Thorpe, who had been making ponderous jokes all the morning, was suddenly observed to grow thoughtful, and (after first ascertaining with some care that there was no one present who had seen him fall in) he astonished the company by saying: “I cannot hear of such escapes from death without awe. It was but the other day that I was saved as by a miracle from drowning.” Then he added, after a little pause, “My whole life seemed to pass before me in a moment.” Now this was not true. Mr. Thorpe’s mind at the moment he referred to had been wholly engrossed by the peculiar sensation that follows the drinking of a gallon of water suddenly when one is not in the least thirsty; but he had already told the tale so often, that he was fully persuaded of it, and, by this time, believed that his excellent and uneventful life had been presented to him as it is to the drowning people in books. His fall was rapid. He grew in some vague way to associate his adventure with the perils of the sea. Whenever he crossed the Channel he would draw some fellow passenger into a conversation, and, having cunningly led it on to the subject of shipwreck, would describe the awful agony of battling with the waves, and the outburst of relief on being saved. At first he did not actually say that he had himself struggled in the vast and shoreless seas of the world, but bit by bit the last shreds of accuracy left him, and he took to painting with minute detail in his conversations the various scenes of his danger and salvation. Sometimes it was in the “steep water off the Banks;” sometimes in “the glassy steaming seas and on the feverish coast of the Bight;” sometimes it was “a point or two norr’ard of the Owers light”--but it was always terrible, graphic, and a lie.