“Go on!” cried Kearns breathlessly. “You are at present,” answered the Colonel, speaking very slowly and distinctly, “upon my estate at Idleslip, seven miles from the county seat of Pemberton. You are in the Empire of the United States, within the realm of His Majesty, Imperial and Royal, William the First, Emperor of the United States, King of the Empire State of New York!” His two auditors were staring at him wide-eyed, speechless. It was difficult to decide whether they took in the full sense of his words. “The date,” continued the Colonel with enforced calm, “is July the twenty-fifth, nineteen hundred and seventy-five. You say you entered the cave June tenth, nineteen hundred. If your statement is correct, you have been in a state of suspended animation for seventy-five years!” CHAPTER IV SEARCHING THE FILES Seventy-five years! For a moment both men stood breathless, stupefied. A groan was stifled upon Kearns’ lips and he leaned heavily upon the table for support. The Professor stared blankly at the speaker, then put both hands to his face and dropped back in his chair. Was this some grim and ghastly joke; some hideous vagary of delirium, or the night? Alas, no! The events through which they had passed; the unfamiliar scenes encountered; the appurtenances of the very room in which they sat; the manner of the Colonel--all proclaimed the absence of illusion and confirmed the existence of stern reality. Seventy-five years! Truly, only a brief span in the cycle of time, in the relentlessly automatic passage of the ages, but how much in the individual life of man. Seventy-five years ago--who inhabited the house, the spot, in which we live? What was our particular ancestor doing; what was he like; what were his thoughts, ideas, aspirations, hopes, ambitions, this day just seventy-five years ago? How many hustling, bustling, hoping, fearing, aspiring men and women who have since passed away and of whom to-day there is not a human being who knows that they ever were on earth. And--seventy-five years hence! Who will then occupy the house, the spot where we to-day live? Who then, as the days sweep by, will ever give a passing thought to us, or perchance even remember we ever existed? So, then, three-quarters of a century had passed and with the passage of time surroundings and conditions had also changed! And these two fortunate, or unfortunate, derelicts of the past--what of them? They were as relics of a bygone age; a species of human flotsam and jetsam cast up upon a foreign shore. A sort of homesickness, a deadly nostalgia, was upon them. Instinctively they turned to each other for sympathy.