Page:The Quest Volume 11 (1919-20).djvu/550

 Almost at once we became intimate friends; and he soon insisted on my staying with him. A month thus passed; and we sat up many a night engaged in deep discourse. But always when I would have asked the purport of the sentence on the book-cover that contained my grandsire's papers, he deftly turned the conversation. "How shall a man escape death if not by ceasing to wait and hope?" What could it mean?

One evening—indeed the last we passed together—our talk had turned on the old witch-trials. I was contending that they must all have been highly hysterical women, when suddenly he said: "So you do not believe a man may leave his body and travel, say, to Blocksberg?" "Shall I show you now?" he asked, looking sharply at me.

I shook my head. "I admit only this much," I said, laughing. "The so-called witches got into a kind of trance by taking narcotic drugs, and were then firmly persuaded they rode through the air on broomsticks!"

He remained sunk in thought. "You will perhaps say that I too travelled only in imagination," he murmured half aloud, and relapsed again into meditation.

After a while he rose slowly, went to his desk and returned with a small book.

"Perhaps you may be interested in what I wrote down here when first I made the experiment many long years ago. I must tell you I was still very young and full of hopes."

I saw from his indrawn look that his memory was going back to far-off days.

"I believed in what men call life, till blow after