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In this desolate apartment in which Mr. Pinto had invited me to see him, there were three chairs, one bottomless, a little table on which you might put a breakfast tray, and not a single other article of furniture. In the next room, the door of which was open, I could see a magnificent gilt dressing case, with some splendid diamond and ruby shirt studs lying by it, and a chest of drawers, and a cupboard apparently full of clothes.

Remembering him in Baden-Baden in great magnificence I wondered at his present denuded state. “You have a house elsewhere, Mr. Pinto?” I said.

“Many,” says he. “I have apartments in many cities. I lock dem up, and do not carry mosh logish.”

I then remembered that his apartment at Baden, where I first met him, was bare, and had no bed in it.

“There is, then, a sleeping room beyond?”

“This is the sleeping room.” (He pronounces it DIS. Can this, by the way, give any clew to the nationality of this singular man?)

“If you sleep on these two old chairs you have a rickety couch; if on the floor, a dusty one.”

“Suppose I sleep up dere?” said this strange man, and he actually pointed up to the ceiling. I thought him mad or what he himself called “an ombog.” “I know. You do not believe me; for why should I deceive you? I came but to propose a matter of business to you. I told you I could give you the clew to the mystery of the Two Children in Black, whom you met at Baden, and you came to see me. If I told you you would not believe me. What for try and convinz you? Ha hey?” And he shook his hand once, twice, thrice, at me, and glared at me out of his eye in a peculiar way.

Of what happened now I protest I cannot give an accurate account. It seemed to me that there shot a flame from his eye into my brain, while behind his GLASS eye there was a green illumination as if a candle had been lit in it. It seemed to me that from his long fingers two quivering flames issued, sputtering, as it were, which penetrated me, and forced me back into one of the chairs–the broken one–out of which I had much difficulty in scrambling, when the strange glamour was ended. It seemed to me that, when I was so fixed, so transfixed in the broken chair, the man floated up to the ceiling, crossed his legs, folded his arms as if he was lying on a sofa, and grinned down at me. When I came to myself he was down from the ceiling, and, taking me out of the broken cane-bottomed chair, kindly enough–“Bah!” said he, “it is the smell of my medicine. It often gives the vertigo. I thought you would have had a little fit. Come into the open air.” And we went down the steps, and into Shepherd’s Inn, where the setting sun was just shining on the statue of Shepherd; the laundresses were traipsing about; the porters were leaning against the railings; and the clerks were playing at marbles, to my inexpressible consolation.

“You said you were going to dine at the ‘Gray’s-Inn Coffee-House,'” he said. I was. I often dine there. There is excellent wine at the “Gray’s-Inn Coffee-House”; but I declare I NEVER SAID so. I was not astonished at his remark; no more astonished than if I was in a dream. Perhaps I WAS in a dream. Is life a dream? Are dreams facts? Is sleeping being really awake? I don’t know. I tell you I am puzzled. I have read “The Woman in White,” “The Strange Story”–not to mention that story “Stranger than Fiction” in the Cornhill Magazine–that story for which THREE credible witnesses are ready to vouch. I have had messages from the dead; and not only from the dead, but from people who never existed at all. I own I am in a state of much bewilderment: but, if you please, will proceed with my simple, my artless story.