came to our assistance. In another moment I was wishing him good-bye, over the apron of a cab, and still with an absurd feeling of minute distinctness, as though—how can I express it?—I not only saw but felt through an inverted opera-glass.
'That stuff,' he said. He put his hand to his forehead. ' I ought not to have given it to you. It will make your head split to-morrow. Wait a minute. Here.' He handed me out a little flat thing like a seidlitz powder. ' Take that in water as you are going to bed. The other thing was a drug. Not till you're ready to go to bed. mind. It will clear your head. That's all. One more shake—Futurus! '
I gripped his shrivelled claw. 'Good-bye,' he said, and by the droop of his eyelids I judged he too was a little under the influence of that brain-twisting cordial.
He recollected something else with a start, felt in his breast-pocket, and produced another packet, this time a cylinder the size and shape of a shaving-stick. 'Here.' said he. 'I'd almost forgotten. Don't open this until I come to-morrow—but take it now.'
It was so heavy that I wellnigh dropped it. 'All ri'!' said I, and he grinned at me through the cab window as the cabman flicked his horse into wakefulness. It was a white packet he had given me, with red seals at either end and along its edge. 'If this isn't money,' said I, 'it's platinum or lead.'
I stuck it with elaborate care into my pocket, and with a whirling brain walked home through the Regent Street loiterers and the dark back streets beyond Portland Road. I remember the sensations of that walk very vividly, strange as they were. I was still so far myself that I could notice my strange mortal state, and wonder whether this stuff I had was opium—a drug beyond my experience. It is hard now to describe the peculiarity of my mental strangeness—mental doubling
