"Don't interrupt, please. I may have made a miscalculation. You see, when I drop off to sleep.... About that book. I started it at breakfast, sent Mrs Hyems away, and never moved from my chair till I'd finished it in the afternoon. Then, when I ripped it in two, I seemed to rip something in myself with it. I can't describe it any other way. Something in me seemed to open and take me right back. Before breakfast that morning I was what they call 'settling down in life.' I'd written _Esau_ since the _Ape_, and had lots of things planned. I'd even got a bit old-maidish about all this"--he indicated his tidy walls. "Then--piff! All that stage of my development seemed to go like smoke. No, no pain; no physical feeling of any kind except that sudden rush of bodily strength. I just tore myself in two as I'd torn the book, and I ran to my glass--the glass I'd shaved in only a few hours ago." "And you saw----?" the words broke breathlessly from me. Slowly he shook his head. "Nothing--that time. _I hadn't been to sleep, you see. A sleep's got to come in between._ That's why you mustn't be here if I go to sleep.... No, it was the next morning I saw it." Faintly I asked him what it was he had seen the next morning. But before he could reply there had come a sudden wicked glitter into his grey-blue eyes. His hand had once more gone to his upturned coat collar. And he chuckled--chuckled. "Not _this_, if that's what you mean," he said with a jerk of his head. "That was my last adventure; the one I'm telling you about now was two before that." Then his chuckle dying away again, "You notice your face when you shave, don't you?--the texture of your skin and so on? Well, that was what I saw: just a few years younger, a few years softer, a few years smoother. The corners of your eyebrows here; you know how the brow gets thin at the sides and those sprouts of long hair begin to come? Well, they'd gone. And I was scared at my strength coming back like that.... I say, get me a drink, will you? No, no, blast it--not that stuff--plain water." I got him the water. He gulped it down. His fingertips were still feeling his eyebrows. Then with another spurt: