The Argosy — page 334: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Rare Case. a17 that your letters had miscarried. Sometimes she has thought that you were dead, Mr. Armitage, but never——” Drew broke off and held out his hand : ‘“‘ We knew you could explain what has happened, sir,” he concluded. Adam drew his own hand across his eyes, in the way a man might do who has lately been roused from a bad dream and has some trouble to collect his thoughts. ‘That has happened,” he said, ‘‘ which, if it had not befallen me myself and become a part of my own experience, I should find it difficult to believe possible. A strange thing has happened, and yet ”— here the old smile they remembered so well broke slowly like light over his face—‘ and yet a thing not more strange, as the world goes, than that you—I say nothing of Mattie—but that you should have trusted me throughout. I detected no mistrust in your voice, no doubt in your eyes, not even when they first met mine just now. They call mine a rare case, friend; they might say the same of your belief in me. But—Stonedene did you say? Walk with me there, and hear my tale as we go.” “This evening ; and in this mist; and you, sir, looking far from well,” began Eliza Bankes, the colour in her cheeks of course attribut- able only to her having stooped over the broken plates. ‘‘ Mattie has waited so long already that one night more will make but little dif- ference.” “One night, one /owrv more than I can help will make all the difference between wilful wrong and a misfortune that has fallen on both alike,” said Adam. He would not be dissuaded from setting out at once, and in another minute the two men were pursuing their way through the driving mist, Adam talking as they went. That which had befallen him had caused huge rejoicings amongst certain of his friends: men whose names stood high in the medical world of science, and who were grateful to him beyond measure for affording them so fine an opportunity of studying a rare case. After parting from Mattie, he had taken train to London, where arriving in due course, he drove in a cab towards his mother’s house in Grosvenor Street, within a few yards of which his cab overturned and Adam was thrown out, falling heavily upon his head. They said his skull was fractured. After a long interval, however, he opened his eyes and recovered consciousness ; and, as he did so, slowly at first, after a time more fully, the astounding discovery was made that memory was entirely gone. It took not days, but weeks to make sure of this. The symptom was attributed to brain fever, to the effects of the shock ; to one thing, then to another; but as time went on andthe mind struggled in vain to remember, just as the body might vainly have tried to use a crushed or paralysed limb, the doc- tors all arrived at the same conclusion. Some portion of the injured skull, pressing upon the brain, had paralysed the nerve of memory. COMIC OOO SS (CO) im