While the above narrative with its details is fresh in the reader's memory, I will introduce another, which, through its connection with the former, may perhaps bring us a little nearer our goal. On the first of May I went pretty early through the Park to eat dinner with a school-master. When we had sat down at a table in the large, open balcony, which was empty, I suddenly experienced a feeling of discomfort, and as I turned round on my chair I perceived a man of very questionable appearance, and with an unsteady, irresolute expression in his eyes.
"Who is that?" I asked my companion, who was an old inhabitant of Lund, and knew the whole population.
"A foreigner, certainly."
The stranger, bare-headed and silent, came near, and, when he stood directly in front of me, he regarded me with such a piercing look that I felt a burning pain in my breast. We changed our seats. The man followed us without breaking silence. His looks were neither malicious nor severe, but rather melancholy and expressionless like those of a somnambulist. Then I had a recollection, which was too vague to be conscious, and addressed a question to my companion. "That man there resembles one of our friends, but which of them?"
"Yes, certainly; he is just like what our friend Martin would be at forty-five."
At this moment there sprang up from a mass of confused memories the Berlin Lavatory and "Friend Martin" (as the unfortunate doctor was called), pursued by this stranger.
Meanwhile the man had taken a seat near us and turned his back. How great was my astonishment when I noticed a protuberance on his neck! In order to clear up the matter, I asked my companion, "Can you see a protuberance on this fellow's neck?"
"Yes, distinctly. What of that?"
I did not answer, because it would have been too long a story. Besides, the school-master was a declared foe of occultism.
The same evening I saw Friend Martin in the middle of a swarm of students. Without beating about the bush I asked him directly, "Where were you to-day between one and two o'clock?"