“I know no more about it than you do,” was his reply. “Either you and I and all the rest of the living world are insane, or else there has been wrought a miracle as strange as any in tradition. How can I explain it? It is a common saying—a common experience, if you will—that we may, on certain trying or tremendous occasions, live years in one moment. But that’s a mental experience, not a physical one, and one that applies, at all events, only to human beings, not to senseless things of wood and metal. You imagine the thing is some trick or jugglery. If it be, I don’t know the secret of it. There’s no chemical appliance that I ever heard of that will get a piece of solid wood into that condition in a few months, or a few years. And it wasn’t done in a few years, or a few months either. A ye
