I suppose it was this reading, and the discussions we had, that made me walk in my sleep that night. That is the only explanation I can give. I know I lay down just as I was—and that’s all I know, until Nellie found me.
The party reported me lost. They searched for days, made what inquiry they could. No faintest clue was ever found. Himalayan precipices are very tall, and very sudden.
My sister Nellie was traveling in Tibet and found me, with a party of peasants. She gathered what she could from them, through interpreters.
It seems that I fell among those people—literally; bruised, stunned, broken, but not dead. Some merciful—or shall I say unmerciful?—trees had softened the fall and let me down easy, comparatively speaking.
They were good people—Buddhists. They mended my bones and cared for me, and it appears made me quite a chief man, in course of time, in their tiny village. But their little valley was so remote and unknown, so out of touch with any and everything, that no tale of this dumb white man ever reached Western ears. I was dumb until I learned their language, was “as a child of a day,” they said—knew absolutely nothing.
They taught me what they knew. I suppose I turned a prayer mill; I suppose I was married—Nellie didn’t ask that, and they never mentioned such a detail. Furthermore, they gave so dim an account of where the place was that we don’t know now; should have to locate that night’s encampment, and then look for a precipice and go down it with ropes.
As I have no longer any interest in those venerable races and time-honored customs, I think we will not do this.
Well, she found me, and something happened. She says I knew her—shouted “Nellie!” and fell down—fell on a stone, too, and hit my head so hard they thought I was dead this time “for sure.” But when I “came to” I came all the way, back to where I was thirty years ago; and as for those thirty years—I do not remember one day of them.
Nor do I wish to. I have those filthy Tibetan clothes, sterilized and packed away, but I never want to look at them.
I am back in the real world, back where I was at twenty-five. But now I am fifty-five—
Now, about Nellie. I must go slowly and get this thing straightened out for good and all.
My little sister! I was always fond of her, and she adored me. She looked up to me, naturally; believed everything I told her; minded me like a little dog—when she was a child. And as she grew into girlhood, I had a strong restraining influence upon her. She wanted to be educated—to go to college—but father wouldn’t hear of it, of course, and I backed him up. If there is anything on earth I always hated and despised, it is a strong-minded woman! That is—it was. I certainly cannot hate and despise my sister Nellie.
Now it appears that soon after my departure from this life father died, very suddenly. Nellie inherited the farm—and the farm turned out to be a mine, and the mine turned out to be worth a good deal of money.
So that poor child, having no natural guardian or protector, just set to work for herself—went to college to her heart’s content, to a foreign university, too. She studied medicine, practiced a while, then was offered a chair in a college and took it; then—I hate to write it—but she is now president of a college—a coeducational college!
“Don’t you mean ‘dean’?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “There is a dean of the girl’s building—but I am the president.”
My little sister!
The worst of it is that my little sister is now forty-eight, and I—to all intents and purposes—am twenty-five! She is twenty-three years older than I am. She has had thirty years of world-life which I have missed entirely, and this thirty years, I begin to gather, has covered more changes than an ordinary century or two.
It is lucky about that mine.
“At least I shall not have to worry about money,” I said to her when she told me about our increased fortune.
She gave one of those queer little smiles, as if she had something up her sleeve, and said:
“No; you won’t have to worry in the least about money.”
Having all that medical skill of hers in the background, she took excellent care of me up there on those dreary plains and hills, brought me back to the coast by easy stages, and home on one of those new steamers—but I mustn’t stop to describe the details of each new thing I notice!
I have sense enough myself, even if I’m not a doctor, to use my mind gradually, not to swallow too fast, as it were.
Nellie is a little inclined to manage me. I don’t know as I blame her. I do feel like a child, sometimes. It is so humiliating not to know little common things such as everybody else knows. Air ships I expected, of course; they had started before I left. They are common enough, all sizes. But water is still the cheaper route—as well as slower.
Nellie said she didn’t want me to get home too quick; she wanted time to explain things. So we spent long, quiet hours in our steamer chairs, talking things over.
It’s no use asking about the family; there is only a flock of young cousins and “once removed” now; the aunts and uncles are mostly gone. Uncle Jake is left. Nellie grins wickedly when she mentions him.
“If things get too hard on you, John, you can go down to Uncle Jake’s and rest up. He and Aunt Dorcas haven’t moved an inch. They fairly barricade their
