"Chalmers," I pleaded to quiet him. "We are living in the third decade of the Twentieth Century." "They are lean and athirst!" he shrieked. "_The Hounds of Tindalos!_" "Chalmers, shall I phone for a physician?" "A physician can not help me now. They are horrors of the soul, and yet"--he hid his face in his hands and groaned--"they are real, Frank. I saw them for a ghastly moment. For a moment I stood on the _other side_. I stood on the pale gray shores beyond time and space. In an awful light that was not light, in a silence that shrieked, I saw _them_. "All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies? I saw them only for a moment; I can not be certain. _But I heard them breathe._ Indescribably for a moment I felt their breath upon my face. They turned toward me and I fled screaming. In a single moment I fled screaming through time. I fled down quintillions of years. "But they scented me. Men awake in them cosmic hungers. We have escaped, momentarily, from the foulness that rings them round. They thirst for that in us which is clean, which emerged from the deed without stain. There is a part of us which did not partake in the deed, and that they hate. But do not imagine that they are literally, prosaically evil. They are beyond good and evil as we know it. They are that which in the beginning fell away from cleanliness. Through the deed they became bodies of death, receptacles of all foulness. But they are not evil in our sense because in the spheres through which they move there is no thought, no morals, no right or wrong as we understand it. There is merely the pure and the foul. The foul expresses itself through angles; the pure through curves. Man, the pure part of him, is descended from a curve. Do not laugh. I mean that literally." I rose and searched for my hat. "I'm dreadfully sorry for you, Chalmers," I said, as I walked toward the door. "But I don't intend to stay and listen to such gibberish. I'll send my physician to see you. He's an elderly, kindly chap and he won't be offended if you tell him to go to the devil. But I hope you'll respect his advice. A week's rest in a good sanitarium should benefit you immeasurably." I heard him laughing as I descended the stairs, but his laughter was so utterly mirthless that it moved me to tears. 2 When Chalmers phoned the following morning my first impulse was to hang up the receiver immediately. His request was so unusual and his voice was so wildly hysterical that I feared any further association with him would result in the impairment of my own sanity. But I could not doubt the genuineness of his misery, and when he broke down completely and I heard him sobbing over the wire I decided to comply with his request. "Very well," I said. "I will come over immediately and bring the plaster."