if it weren't for kirchoff's testimony i'd say ned minton had gone raving crazy," i declared as the door closed on our visitors. "the whole thing's wilder than an opium smoker's dream—that meeting with the girl in new orleans, the snake that comes and disappears, the assignation in the cemetery—it's all too preposterous. but i know kirchoff. he's as unimaginative as a side of sole-leather, and as efficient as he is unimaginative. if he says minton's dog died of snake-bite that's what it died of, but the whole affair's so utterly fantastic——"

"agreed," de grandin nodded; "but what is fantasy but the appearance of mental images as such, severed from ordinary relations? the 'ordinary relations' of images are those to which we are accustomed, which conform to our experience. the wider that experience, the more ordinary will we find extraordinary relations. by example, take yourself: you sit in a dark auditorium and see a railway train come rushing at you. now, it is not at all in ordinary experience for a locomotive to come dashing in a theater filled with people, it is quite otherwise; but you keep your seat, you do not flinch, you are not frightened. it is nothing but a motion picture, which you understand. but if you were a savage from new guinea you would rise and fly in panic from this steaming, shrieking iron monster which bears down on you. tiens, it is a matter of experience, you see. to you it is an everyday event, to the savage it would be a new and terrifying thing.

"or, perhaps, you are at the hospital. you place a patient between you and the crookes' tube of an x-ray, you turn on the current, you observe him through the fluoroscope and pouf! his flesh all melts away and his bones spring out in sharp relief. three hundred years ago you would have howled like a stoned dog at the sight, and prayed to be delivered from the witchcraft which produced it. today you curse and swear like twenty drunken pirates if the r?ntgenologist is but thirty seconds late in setting up the apparatus. these things are 'scientific,' you understand their underlying formul?, therefore they seem natural. but mention what you please to call the occult, and you scoff, and that is but admitting that you are opposed to something which you do not understand. the credible and believable is that to which we are accustomed, the fantastic and incredible is what we cannot explain in terms of previous experience. voilà, c'est très simple, n'est-ce-pas?"

"you mean to say you understand all this?"

"not at all by any means; i am clever, me, but not that clever. no, my friend, i am as much in the dark as you, only i do not refuse to credit what our young friend tells us. i believe the things he has related happened, exactly as he has recounted them. i do not understand, but i believe. accordingly, i must probe, i must sift, i must examine this matter. we see it now as a group of unrelated and irrelevant occurrences, but somewhere lies the key which will enable us to make harmony from this discord, to gather these stray, tangled threads into an ordered pattern. i go to seek that key."

"where?"

"to new orleans, of course. tonight i pack my portmanteaux, tomorrow i entrain. just now"—he smothered a tremendous yawn—"now i do what every wise man does as often as he can. i take a drink."