With special insistence and appeal and with arguments whose soundness I was forced to admit, I had even allowed Dr Wayne to clip my super-abundant locks, and had likewise consented to clothe myself in a tolerable suit of blue serge, which he had begged from a good-natured passenger of unusual height. Thus clad and groomed, I managed to leave the boat in company with my careful protector without exciting overmuch curiosity either from my fellow-travellers of the _Orissa_ or from the crowd on the landing-stage. After a certain amount of staring and a good many inquiries, which Dr Wayne skilfully parried, I found myself in a cab loaded with the Doctor's luggage jolting through the squalid streets of Liverpool on our way to a hotel. Here we spent a few hours in a private room, surrounded by masses of newspapers which my companion set to study with intense eagerness. And here I shall digress a little in order to confront a real difficulty of understanding which must have already struck the reader. How evolved it that a complete stranger like Dr Charles Wayne allowed himself to be so burdened with such an incubus as myself? That is a query, I admit, which none save Dr Wayne is competent to answer, but I suspect even he can hardly solve the difficulty satisfactorily. When he comes to read these pages in due course, he may conceivably be able to say, "It was this," or "It was that, which not only aroused my interest in this mysterious being but also impelled me to serve and obey him henceforward." Yet even then I think he will fail to analyse truthfully the different motives which induced him thus to surrender his own freedom of action and to place himself without a murmur at my disposal. It may have been my piteous condition of solitude; it may have been my almost unearthly beauty of form and face; it may have been my uncanny misfortune out in mid-ocean; it may have been my quiet arrogance and originality of demeanour; it may have been his professional curiosity in a prospective patient;--it may have been one, or some, or all, or none of these things which contributed to his subservience. I cannot tell, and I feel Dr Wayne may be no wiser in the matter than myself. Sometimes I imagine that some faint exhalation of the supernatural must cling around my person, for it does not seem impossible to me that after adventures such as mine a delicate psychical fragrance (if I may so dare to describe that which is in reality indescribable) may permeate my bodily husk. Such an aroma, though but dimly comprehended, might admittedly prove of irresistible attraction to that rare spiritual type of humanity to which I strongly hold Dr Wayne to belong in spite of his homely exterior. I trust he will pardon the apparent impertinence of this statement, since it proceeds from the sole being who has been able to discover and appreciate the inherent sweetness and strength of his soul within. And for my own part I am often haunted by