that I can regard these lines, written from mechanical professional habit and never to be seen by human eyes, as the words of one who is already dead, so closely does he stand to the shadowed borderland over which all outside this one little circle of friends have already gone.  I feel how wise and true were the words of Challenger when he said that the real tragedy would be if we were left behind when all that is noble and good and beautiful had passed.  But of that there can surely be no danger.  Already our second tube of oxygen is drawing to an end.  We can count the poor dregs of our lives almost to a minute.

We have just been treated to a lecture, a good quarter of an hour long, from Challenger, who was so excited that he roared and bellowed as if he were addressing his old rows of scientific sceptics in the Queen’s Hall.  He had certainly a strange audience to harangue:  his wife perfectly acquiescent and absolutely ignorant of his meaning, Summerlee seated in the shadow, querulous and critical but interested, Lord John lounging in a corner somewhat bored by the whole proceeding, and myself beside the window watching the scene with a kind of detached attention, as if it were all a dream or something in which I had no personal interest whatever.  Challenger sat at the centre table with the electric light illuminating the slide under the microscope which he had brought from his dressing room.  The small vivid circle of white light from the mirror left half of his rugged, bearded face in brilliant radiance and half in deepest shadow.  He had, it seems, been working of late upon the lowest forms of life, and what excited him at the present moment was that in the microscopic slide made up the day before he found the amoeba to be still alive.

“You can see it for yourselves,” he kept repeating in great excitement.  “Summerlee, will you step across and satisfy yourself upon the point?  Malone, will you kindly verify what I say?  The little spindle-shaped things in the centre are diatoms and may be disregarded since they are probably vegetable rather than animal.  But the right-hand side you will see an undoubted amoeba, moving sluggishly across the field.  The upper screw is the fine adjustment.  Look at it for yourselves.”

Summerlee did so and acquiesced.  So did I and perceived a little creature which looked as if it were made of ground glass flowing in a sticky way across the lighted circle.  Lord John was prepared to take him on trust.

“I’m not troublin’ my head whether he’s alive or dead,” said he.  “We don’t so much as know each other by sight, so why should I take it to heart?  I don’t suppose he’s worryin’ himself over the state of our health.”

I laughed at this, and Challenger looked in my direction with his coldest and most supercilious stare.  It was a most petrifying experience.

“The flippancy of the half-educated is more obstructive to science than the obtuseness of the ignorant,” said he.  “If Lord John Roxton would condescend——­”