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The Visitor "which," he added lucidly enough, "would be your 2187."

"Why?" said I, bewildered, when he told me this.

"Good Lord!" he answered, quite frankly astonished, "you must know, even in 1909, that the calendar is four years out?"

I answered that a little handful of learned men knew this, but that we had not changed our reckoning for various practical reasons. To which he replied, leaning forward with a learned, interested look:

"Well, I came to learn things, and I lay I'm learning."

He next went on to tell me that he had laid a bet with another man that he would "hit" 1903, on the 15th of June, and that the other man had laid a bet that he would get nearer. They were to meet at the Savoy Hotel at noon on the 30th, and to compare notes; and whichever had won was to pay the other a set of Records, for it seems they were both Antiquarians.

All this was Greek to me (as I daresay it is to you) until he pulled out of his pocket a thing like a watch, and noted that the dial was set at 1909. Whereupon he began tapping it and cursing in the name of a number of Saints familiar to us all.

It seems that to go backwards in time, according to him, was an art easily achieved towards the middle of the Twenty-second Century, and it was 83