When he stood at the doorway of Letter E and read the name, white-lettered on black, “Dr. Sheepshanks,” he remembered that here Sheepshanks had lived thirty years ago. Probably the same rooms. On the second floor. He mounted the winding wooden stairs. Yes: above the unsported oak (the infallible porter was right) the name of Dr. Sheepshanks was inscribed. He paused for an instant before knocking at the inner door, because all his youth came surging back on him. He saw himself a freshman, tapping with nervous knuckles at the almost sacred portal of the famous coach, the fount of all mathematical science, the legendary being who had the power to make senior wranglers at will. He saw himself the third year man, rapping confidently, secure in the knowledge that Sheepshanks had staked his reputation on his triumph. He saw himself smiting the door defiantly, after the lists had been published . . . “Spooner, Jenkins, Baltazar . . .” Spooner had read with Roberts of Trinity; but Jenkins had been a Sheepshanks man. . . . He saw himself, many and many a time afterwards, when he had stepped into his universally acknowledged own, thumping it with friendly familiarity. That heavy, black oak door, invitingly open, held the secrets of his vivid youth. At last he knocked, but the knock—so it seemed—was devoid of character. A voice—the same sharp, nasal voice—it sent him back again to freshman’s days—cried: “Come in.” He opened the door, stood on the threshold. The back of Sheepshanks, working at his desk by the great window looking over the master’s garden, met his eyes, across the large library table that occupied the centre of the room. It was the same old table—the table at which he had sat with the superior first batch of pupils, during his undergraduate days. How often then and in after days he had entered on that cracked “Come in,” and seen that lean back and bowed head, and waited the few seconds, as he was doing now, for the owner to finish his sentence and swing round in his chair—the same old swivel-chair. After the same second or two, Sheepshanks turned round and, as in one movement, rose to his feet. He was a small, brown, wrinkled, clean-shaven man in the early sixties, with eyes masked by thick myopic lenses, spectacles set in gold rims. His hair short, but curly, gleamed a dazzling white. It was a shock of memory to Baltazar to realize that when he had last seen it, it was raven black. “Yes?” said Sheepshanks, enquiringly. Baltazar strode past the library table with outstretched hand. “Don’t pretend you’ve never seen me before, Sheepshanks.” Sheepshanks made a step forward, peered through his glasses, then recoiled and gasped: “Baltazar!” “You’ve hit it, my dear old friend. I’m not a ghost. I’m live flesh and blood. I’m John Baltazar right enough.” “God bless my soul!” said Sheepshanks. “We thought you must be dead. Do sit down.”