The thought that I might soon get in touch with my old world did not excite me.  I had not much faith anyway that I was to re-establish former relations with it, and what little faith I had was all but destroyed on the morning of August 30th, 1902, when a short message, written on a slip of paper, reached me by the hand of an attendant.  It informed me that my conservator would call that afternoon.  I thought it a lie.  I felt that any brother of mine would have taken the pains to send a letter in reply to the first I had written him in over two years.  The thought that there had not been time for him to do so and that this message must have arrived by telephone did not then occur to me.  What I believed was that my own letter had been confiscated.  I asked one of the doctors to swear on his honor that it really was my own brother who was coming to see me.  This he did.  But abnormal suspicion robbed all men in my sight of whatever honor they may have had, and I was not fully reassured.

In the afternoon, as usual, the patients were taken out of doors, I among them.  I wandered about the lawn and cast frequent and expectant glances toward the gate, through which I believed my anticipated visitor would soon pass.  In less than an hour he appeared.  I first caught sight of him about three hundred feet away, and, impelled more by curiosity than hope, I advanced to meet him.  “I wonder what the lie will be this time,” was the gist of my thoughts.

The person approaching me was indeed the counterpart of my brother as I remembered him.  Yet he was no more my brother than he had been at any time during the preceding two years.  He was still a detective.  Such he was when I shook his hand.  As soon as that ceremony was over, he drew forth a leather pocketbook.  I instantly recognized it as one I myself had carried for several years prior to the time I was taken ill in 1900.  It was from this that he took my recent letter.

“Here’s my passport,” he said.

“It’s a good thing you brought it,” I replied, as I glanced at it and again shook his hand—­this time the hand of my own brother.

“Don’t you want to read it?” he asked.

“There is no need of that.  I am convinced.”

After my long journey of exploration in the jungle of a tangled imagination, a journey which finally ended in my finding the person for whom I had long searched, my behavior differed very little from that of a great explorer who, full of doubt after a long and perilous trip through real jungles, found the man he sought and, grasping his hand, greeted him with the simple and historic words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”