He looked at me searchingly, and for the first time I seemed to see him as he really was--a rather pathetic, bent old man, bowed with the weight of a great invisible something--a shadow--a menace! But even as he stood there, his body suddenly straightened itself and his eyes lit up with a strange brightness. It was as though a quick flutter of youth had run through his veins. "You've read it?" he asked. "Yes," I confessed. "Do you think it--possible?" It was obvious that great tact was required in framing an answer to such a question. "I shouldn't like to say. It's possible, perhaps; but it seems extremely improbable. These doctors and scientists are always experimenting on the human body. And yet--are we any better than we were a thousand years ago?" It was not clear whether he had caught the gist of my reply, and for a long time he remained silent and thoughtful. "I've been readin' in _The Encyclopædia Britannica_ about those--glands," he said, a little sheepishly. "It's a queer thing that I've never noticed them before. That newspaper article isn't as foolish as you think, George." "You misunderstood me, sir. What I said was . . ." "You're too sceptical, my boy!" It seemed strange to hear the old accusing the young of scepticism, but I let it pass. "One reads of so many new ideas nowadays," I remarked, weakly. "That's true. But there have been some big things done since I was a lad. I remember the first railway at home; the bicycle, the pneumatic tire, and then--the first motor car. Now there's the aeroplane. Flying! That's wonderful, George!" "It is!" "All this inoculation, too. . . . That's happened in my lifetime. You seldom see people scarred with smallpox, nowadays. When I was a youngster . . ." He fell into reminiscences, those peculiar mental rakings over the buried past. "It seems only the other day that my father took me by stage-coach from New York to Boston. No subways, then--all that vast subterranean burrowing was unthought of. . . . The suggestion of such a thing would have been enough to send a man to the nearest lunatic asylum. . . . Chloroform, cocaine--all the paraphernalia of modern surgery and medicine. You can't realize the surgeon of my young days. He was merely a glorified butcher. . . . Had to be!"