"'When consciousness returned, and I was able to realise what had happened, I found myself lying on the sloping embankment of the line, where I had been laid by the men who had extricated me from the wrecked carriage. A yard or two away lay stretched the body of my travelling companion, stone dead. A little brandy, administered by I know not whom, revived me wonderfully, and thereupon I woke to the necessity of recovering my missing shorthand notes, which doubtless were somewhere among the _débris_ of the carriage. Feeling still too shaken and bruised to go in search of them myself, I gave a platelayer half-a-crown to find them for me by the aid of his hand-lamp. After a quarter of an hour he returned with a jumble of loose papers, which he said were all that he could find. Without looking at them, I thrust them into my pocket, and it was not I after I reached home, some five or six hours later, and came to examine them, that I found among them the sheets which my dead travelling companion had been reading at the moment of the accident, which the platelayer, in ignorance of their not being my property, had rescued from the wreck together with my own. "'For the time being I laid them aside, but later in the day, when my own work had been despatched, I sat down to read them; and next day, when I went down by train to attend the inquest to which I had been summoned as a witness, I took the papers with me. And now comes a very singular feature of the affair. The body of my travelling companion was never identified; nor, so far as I am aware, is it known to this day who he was; nor, beyond such information on the point as the railway-ticket found in one of his pockets afforded, whence he had come or for what place other than London--which is a big address--he was bound. He seemed to have been travelling without luggage of any kind; his linen was unmarked, and there was nothing whatever found on him by the aid of which his identity could be established. Under those circumstances, I kept the dead man's papers by me, saying no word about them to anybody. As a matter of course, I took the precaution of looking carefully through them with a view of ascertaining whether they furnished any clue to the personality of the writer, but none such could I find. When I tell you this, Mr. Winslade, you will at once understand in what light I regarded the MS. To me it seemed neither more nor less than a rather clever little magazine story--a piece of pure fiction, in point of fact. As such I read it, and such I should have still believed it to be but for what you have told me this evening. "'Well, sir, some three or four months after the unknown writer of the MS. had been buried, I said to myself one day, "Why not write it out in my own hand, invent an ending to it, give it a name, and send it to one of the magazines? If it comes back it will only be one failure the more." And failures in that line were things to which I was becoming pretty well used.'