Enclosed in the package was a heavy skin box, about eight inches square by four high. I opened this with a small key hanging by silk thread from the lid, and at once sat back in my chair gasping and blinking with astonishment. The casket was full to the brim with large uncut diamonds, not one of them smaller than a marble and all apparently of very fine quality. My skill in gems was not professional, but I could see at a glance that these stones must be worth many thousands of pounds sterling; and if I had been curious to read Mirlees' manuscript before, now my eagerness was whipped to the point of fever. I tore off the wrappings from the close-writ ten quarto sheets and began to peruse them. The house boy came in with a note from Randegger (my partner at the office) inquiring rather acidly if I was ill. I looked up at the clock. It was two in the afternoon. I then remembered that the boy had entered the room some time before but that I had ordered him out without hearing what he had to say. That must have been at tiffin time: I had been reading for four hours solid, lost to all else in the world. I sent a note to Randegger pleading urgent private affairs, and resumed the reading of Mirlees' narrative. It was dark before I had finished, for the manuscript, though not of an inordinate length, was written, till quite near the end, in Mirlees' crabbed, scholarly, meticulously fashioned hand, and did not admit of a rapid perusal. Nor was the subject matter of a sort to encourage skipping. As I worked from phase to phase of the amazing story it seemed to me that never before in the history of written words could so strange, so incredible, yet withal so convincing a record of events have been placed on paper. Time after time I flung down the manuscript almost in anger--only to pick it up a moment later and find the precise spot where I had left off. Now I felt that I was in the grip of a tale of such force as only the hall-mark of truth can give, now I seemed to be listening to the ingenious but wild fancies of a madman. Here was human experience set at naught, the history which has passed as certainty for two thousand years brusquely picked up and thrown down gutted like cod under the fishmonger's knife--and on what evidence? The statements of one man, unsupported by a single witness. It was monstrous, unthinkable! No sane person could have offered such testimony. It is a commonplace saying that genius may come near to insanity. Mirlees possessed the brilliant, bold, penetrating type of intellect which we are in the habit of calling genius--that I had felt during my previous encounter with him. Surely towards these his last days his brain had given way, and this screed I was now perusing was the reflection not of his observations and experience but of the disordered fancies of an unbalanced mind?