I knew from his preoccupied air that my friend Ralph Tyler had become absorbed in a certain slender pamphlet.I had found him studying it when I called: aside from brief greetings and an assurance that he would ‘be with me in a minute’ we had exchanged hardly any conversation.At length he sighed, put down this intriguing literature, stretched, then adopted the slumped, lazy position in his threadbare armchair which usually betokened a reflective mood, or the prelude to some thinking aloud. In accompanying Ralph Tyler during his researches into strange and disturbing matters I cannot pretend to have very often contributed much by way of practical insight or specialised knowledge, but I believe that he was often glad of the presence of someone to whom he could expound his theories, or put forward several possibilities. This process seemed to enhance the ready intuition which was his most notable faculty.‘It is like this,’ he began, suddenly, and without any other preamble, almost as if resuming an interrupted conversation.
