Pause for one moment more and think what El Dorado has meant to mankind, think with all your might; and then think what must have been the feelings of the man who stood looking upon it, and knew that he--that _he_--had found it. In such moments of transfiguring realization men often lose their reason, and, as we say, it is not a little surprising that Dr. Smyth is alive to tell the tale. The lovely knowledge might well have struck him as by lightning, and the secret once more have been buried in oblivion. I have all along taken it for granted that Dr. Smyth's _The Gilded Man_ is a genuine narrative, the true story of a wonderful happening. If any one should come to me and tell me that I am simple-minded, that it is no such thing, and that, as the children say, Dr. Smyth "made it up all out of his own head," I should still need a lot of convincing, and, were conviction at last forced upon me, I could only answer that Dr. Smyth must then possess a power of creating illusion such as few romancers have possessed. For there is a plausibility, a particularity, a concreteness about all the scenes and personages in _The Gilded Man_ that make it impossible not to believe them true and actual, however removed from common experience they may seem. I should like very much to be more particular, but I cannot very well be so without betraying the story--or "true and veracious history," whichever it may turn out to be. Still I can hint at one or two matters without betraying too much. The mysterious queen, Sajipona, for example, seems not only real, but she and her love-story make one of the loveliest idylls in what, for want of a better word, one may call "supernatural" romance that has ever been written. And all the dream-like happenings in the great cave, though of the veritable "stuff that dreams are made of," are endowed with as near and moving a sense of reality as though they were enacted on Broadway.