Yet I know, in my own personal experience, and have heard from
others, from men of age, sagacity, and acquaintance with the greatest
affairs, instances in which people have been distinctly seen by sane,
healthy, and honourable witnesses, in places and circumstances where it
was (as we say) "physically impossible" that they should have been, and
where they certainly were not themselves aware of having been. That is
why human testimony seems to me to establish no more, in certain
circumstances, than a highly probable working hypothesis--a hypothesis on
which, of course, we are bound to act.
There is little more to tell. By dint of careful nursing, poor Allen was
enabled to travel; he reached Mentone, and there the mistral ended him.
He was a lonely man, with no kinsfolk; his character was cleared among
the people who knew him best; the others have forgotten him. Nobody can
be injured by this explanation of his silence when called on to prove his
innocence, and of his unusually successful vanishing from a society which
had never tried very hard to discover him in his retreat. He has lived
and suffered and died, and left behind him little but an incident in the
History of the Unexplained.
THE COMPLETE BUNGLER
SCENE I.--HAMPSHIRE
PISCATOR ANGLUS. PISCATOR SCOTUS
Scotus.
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