'He certainly is in a wonderful state of preservation,' murmured Dr. Gregory. 'Altogether beyond anything I expected to find.' My strength returning, I tried to go forward. But the young gentleman stopped me. 'Be careful! Haven't you heard enough?' 'I want to see! I want to see!' I went and saw. I saw something lying in a coffin; something so like my James that it wasn't strange they should think that it was he. But I was his wife; and I saw with different eyes; so that I knew better in an instant. 'That's not my James! That's not my James! Why--I don't believe--that--it's a man at all.' Dr. Clinton, putting out his hand, touched the face which lay there staring up at us. 'She's right. It's some sort of a dummy.' There was a curious cry, like none I'd heard before, and the sound of a heavy body falling. It was Mr. Howarth tumbling to the ground. Miss Desmond, hastening in, knelt on the floor at his side. BOOK III.--THE GENTLEMAN WITH NINE LIVES THE ADVENTURES OF A GENTLEMAN IN SEARCH OF FORTUNE, AS TOLD BY HIMSELF CHAPTER XXI A PEER IN EMBRYO Extraordinary how small the world Is. A remark which is not original. Thus making the fact still more conspicuous. For a thing must be very obvious to force itself on the attention of the ordinary ass. Who would have thought that a lying scamp was telling the truth when I supposed him to be more than usually engaged in its perversion? It was at a certain house of call in San Francisco that I first met him--M'Croskay's, where they knew a thing or two. There was a man standing before the fire when I went in. When he saw me he said, 'Hollo! You're me!' That was the first time I heard him speak the truth, and, until the other day, I believed it was the last. It was a fact. I was him; his _alter ego_; his brother Dromio. The joke was, he was a blackguard too. At a sale we might have been exploited as an interchangeable lot; and a bitter bargain. If there was anything he'd stick at, I never found it. He was as mad as I was. And as great a liar. There was only one point on which we differed; and that was tongue. How that man could talk! A hundred and twenty thousand words to my one. It was convenient, at times--that conversational gift of his. For he'd contradict himself so often in the course of half-an-hour that you'd begin to wonder if the truth hadn't slipped into the mess by accident. It seems it actually did. Though it took me ten years to discover just where.