"Strange!" said he; "I would bet a golden guinea that your name is Berwick Jones. Some people cannot remember their names at all--any part of their names. Others see blue for red. Others do this and do that; there seems to be no limit to the vagaries of the mind. I'd rather risk that signature which you made before you were hurt."
"My name is Jones Berwick, Doctor. This signature cannot be trusted. It is full of suspicion. Don't you see that all the lower part of the leaf has been torn off? What was it torn off for? Why, of course, to destroy the name of the regiment to which the owner belonged! B. Jones is common enough; Jones Berwick is not so common. I found it, or else it got into my pocket by mistake. No wonder that a man named Jones is not called for."
"But, Jones, how can you account for the writing, which is identical? Even if we say that the signature is wrong, still we cannot account for the rest unless you wrote it. It is very romantic, and all that, to say that somebody imitated your handwriting in the body of the book, but it is very far-fetched. Find some other theory."
"But see how few dates are filled!" I exclaimed.
"Yet the writing itself accounts for that. On May twenty-third you began. You tell us that you had just returned from home, where you had been on furlough. You left your former diary, if you had kept one, at home. You end on May twenty-seventh, just a few days ago."
"My name is Jones Berwick," I said.
"By the by, let me see that book a moment."
I handed it to him.
"No; no imprint, or else it has been torn out," he said; "I wanted to see who printed it."
"What would that have shown?"