He was a distressing
spectacle--his body and face all blackened with the slimy peat-mud; and
he fell half-fainting on the grass, convulsed by a terrible cough. My
first care was to give him whiskey, by perhaps a mistaken impulse of
humanity; my next, as he lay, exhausted, was to bring water in my hat,
and remove the black mud from his face.
Then I saw Percy Allen--Allen of St. Jude's! His face was wasted, his
thin long beard (he had not worn a beard of old), clogged as it was with
peat-stains, showed flecks of grey.
"Allen--Percy!" I said; "what wind blew _you_ here?"
But he did not answer; and, as he coughed, it was too plain that the
shock of his accident had broken some vessel in the lungs. I tended him
as well as I knew how to do it. I sat beside him, giving him what
comfort I might, and all the time my memory flew back to college days,
and to our strange and most unhappy last meeting, and his subsequent
inevitable disgrace. Far away from here--Loch Nan and the vacant
moors--my memory wandered.
It was at Blocksby's auction-room, in a street near the Strand, on the
eve of a great book-sale three years before, that we had met, for almost
the last time, as I believed, though it is true that we had not spoken on
that occasion. It is necessary that I should explain what occurred, or
what I and three other credible witnesses believed to have occurred; for,
upon my word, the more I see and hear of human evidence of any event, the
less do I regard it as establishing anything better than an excessively
probable hypothesis.
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