I have told his story as he told it to me.
There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the
victim of the coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type
of hallucination and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my
profoundest belief. You may think me superstitious if you will,
and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had
in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something--I know not
what--that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a
secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether
more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him
in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost
mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination.
We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our
daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger
and death. But did he see like that?
THE STAR
It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement
was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the
motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets
that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had
already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity
in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to
interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were
unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the
astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint
remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause
any very great excitement.
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