degree and my Doctorate, I felt the need of some interest to merge all the divergent sides of my nature. Something that would give me a chance to be both the artist and the man of science. That was a quarter of a century ago. The motion picture and the phonograph were just coming into the public eye. They seemed to supply just the field for which I felt a need.

"I had much the same idea as yourself, except that there were no discoveries to back it—no color photography, no method for harmonizing sound and sight. Indeed, neither the screen nor the phonograph had come to be regarded yet as essentially more than a toy. But, like yourself, I had vision. And enthusiasm. And an intense desire to create.

"After I had taken my degrees, I went to work with almost abnormal intensity. With sufficient income to live as I desired, I fitted up my laboratory and concentrated on the thing I wanted to do. I spent years at it. I gave my youth—or, at least, the best of my youth—to that labor. Long before sound and color pictures were perfected commercially, I had developed similar processes for myself. But they were not what I wanted. The real thing was beyond my grasp, and I couldn't see how to attain it.

"I worked feverishly. I think I must have worked myself into a sort of frenzy, a sort of madness. I never mingled with people, and I became bitter and despondent. One day my nerves broke down. I smashed everything in my laboratory, all my models, all my apparatus, and I burned the plans and papers I had labored over for years.

"My physician told me that I must rest and recuperate. He told me I must interest myself again in daily life, in people and inanimate things. So I went away. For the next few years I traveled. I tore myself away from everything scientific and plunged into the business of living. Almost overnight I became an adventurer, tasting sensations with the same ardor I had once given to my work. I went back to art, to painting and literature and music. I was a connoisseur of wines and of foods and of women. I was an experimenter with life.

"Little by little, though, the zest of that passed away. I grew tired of my dilettantism. And eventually I found that, even while I had been moving about the world and experiencing its curious values, my mind had been grappling quietly, subconsciously, with my old problem. The change in my life had given me the wider outlook, the keener understanding necessary to the accomplishment of my task. In the end, I went back to it again with renewed vigor. With greater power, too, and greater sanity."

Melbourne paused here. Sensing his need, I brought him a highball, and one for myself. He tasted it with a quizzical expression.

"They call this whisky nowadays!" he observed absently, with quiet irony. I wanted to hear the rest of his account.

"Go on with your story, sir," I begged him.

"The rest is simple enough—but it's the meat of the narrative. You see, I had to revise the way I was going about my work, and I went at it at a new angle. By this time wireless telegraphy was being widely developed, and there were many features of it that appealed to me. With the knowledge I had gained during my first feverish years of experiment, however, I was able to go far beyond what has been done in recent times with radio.

"I used a system differing in many respects from that of the commercial radio. We haven't time now to go into all that—I can tell you later, and it involves much that is highly technical and still secret. It is sufficient if I explain that my object was to evolve and fuse methods for doing with each of the senses what radio does with sound. Telephotography was the simplest problem—the others required an almost superhuman amount of labor.

"But my biggest job was to combine them. And, to do that, I had to use knowledge I had gained not only in the laboratory but in my wanderings about the earth—not only in the colleges and salons of Europe and America, but in the bazaars and temples of India, Egypt, China. I had to unite the lore of ancient and modern civilizations, and I created a new factor in electrical science. I suppose the simplest and most intelligible name for it would be mental telepathy. But it is more than that, and basically it is as simple and material as your own motion pictures."

I think Melbourne would have gone on and told me more about his discoveries. At that moment, however, he paused to reflect, and we looked up to find the others leaving. The bottle of Scotch was empty.

"Ready, Melbourne?" Barclay called. We rose.

"I didn't realize it was so late," Melbourne answered. "Mr. Barrett and I have found each other most interesting."

We all found our hats and went out. Melbourne and Barclay, each apologizing for having neglected the other, said good-bye. Barclay was tired and wanted to go to bed. He went off with the others, but Melbourne turned my way.

"If you're not too weary of my company," he said, "I'll go with you a little way."

"You know I'm not," I answered. "I've never been so interested in anything before. It sounds like a chapter from Wells, or Jules Verne."

He smiled, with a little shake of his head, and we walked on for awhile in silence toward the lake....

All this came back to me swiftly and with an effect of incoherence, much as a dream moves, during the few moments when I was getting ready for my bath. I laid out my shaving things, and put a record on the Victrola. I have never quite conquered my need for music while I bathe and dress. I think the record was a Grieg nocturne—something cool and quiet, with a touch of acutely sweet pain and melancholy.

Then I happened to glance at a mirror for the first time. I stood amazed and transfixed. Overnight I had grown a beard such as wanderers bring back with them from the wilderness. Under the beard, my face seemed to have altered somehow, to have changed in some peculiar way. Physically it appeared younger, with an expression of calm and repose such as I had never before seen on a man's face. But the eyes were wise and old, as if—overnight!—the mind behind them had learned the knowledge of all time.

Or was it overnight? I could not lose that feeling that time had passed by since my last contact with ordinary life. It was as though, somewhere and somehow, I had lived for weeks or months in some new plane, and forgotten it. I felt richer and older than I had once felt, and the things I had been remembering seemed remote.

At that moment, a chance strain from the machine in my living room brought back a whole new group of vivid impressions, strange and yet in a sense more familiar than my memories of Melbourne. They opened up to me a different life in which I seemed to have participated by chance, and a life which had, at first sight, no point of contact with the reality to which I had returned....

A Chance Strain from Grieg

I recalled waking up in another place, on a long slope of green hill that overlooked a valley. It was dawn again. The sun was just rising over the crest of the hill behind me, and it threw long shadows across the grass from the tall, slender trees along the summit. Down in the valley a broad, clean river of clear water followed the curve of the hill until it disappeared from sight. There were other hills beyond the river, all with the same long, simple slope of grass; and, beyond the hills, there were the tops of blue mountains, swathed in white morning mist.

It was a strange place. Its strangeness consisted in a subtle appearance of order and care, as though a