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"Do you realize the truth now, my good man?"

After uttering this cryptic remark, he took the black leather case which had been hanging by a strap over one shoulder and calmly began to unlock it with a small key. Then, taking out a very old pair of binoculars, he held them out to me.

"Look through these," he invited.

I was reaching for the glasses when he interrupted: "No, no, you're standing too near. Step back a little. . . .There, that's better."

Although it was a strange invitation, I was gripped by an intense curiosity. The binoculars were queerly shaped, and their leather case was worn with age and use, its inner layer of brass showing here and there. Like the clothes of their owner, the binoculars too were quite a museum piece.

Taking the proffered binoculars, I raised them casually to my eyes. But the old man suddenly cried out so piercingly that I almost dropped the glasses.

"No, no, no! Wait, wait! You're holding them the wrong way!" he shrieked wildly. "Don't—don't ever do that again!"

Startled by the outcry and the insane light gleaming in his eyes, I lowered the instrument and mumbled a hasty apology, although for the life of me I could not understand the reason for his sudden consternation.

Raising the binoculars again, this time in the proper way, I began to adjust the lenses, and gradually there came into focus an amazingly large image of the girl on the tablet—her white skin glistening with an utterly natural lustre, and her entire body seeming to move.

Within the confines of the antique nineteenth-century binoculars which I held in my trembling hands, there vividly existed another world, entirely alien from my own. And, within this realm, there lived and breathed the gorgeous young girl, incongruously enjoying a téte-à-tète with the white-haired old man who was surely old enough to be her grandfather.

"This must be witchcraft!" I unconsciously warned myself. But like a person caught in a hypnotic trance, I found it impossible to avert my eyes.

Although I could see that the girl was quite immobile, her whole appearance seemed to have undergone a complete transformation. She now seemed to be a totally different creature from the one I had scrutinized with my naked eye. But whatever the changes which had been wrought, they were all to the good. Now her whole body seemed to quiver with life. Her pale face had turned a rosy pink. And as for her breasts—they now seemed to be actually pulsing beneath her thin, silken kimono.

After I had feasted my delighted eyes on every inch of her luscious, delicately moulded body, I turned the glasses on the happy, white-haired old man against whom the girl was leaning. He too seemed to live and breathe in the realm of the binoculars. As I watched, speechless with wonder, it seemed that he was trying to embrace this girl who was but a mere child compared to his venerable old age. But quickly I also caught another expression on his wrinkled face—a terrifying mixture of grief and agony.

At this point I began to imagine that I was caught up in the terrors of a nightmare, and, by sheer force of will, I pulled the binoculars down and looked around. But nothing had changed. There I was, still standing in the dimly lit railway coach, with the pasted rag picture on the tablet and the old man, plus the darkness outside, filling my gaze, with the same monotonous rumbling of the train's wheels vibrating in my ears.

"You look deadly pale," my strange companion remarked, eyeing me intently.

"Can I help it. . . after what I've seen?" I replied nervously. "For a moment I thought I'd gone insane."

He ignored my words and continued to stare, so I tried to conceal my embarrassment with a commonplace remark.

"It's quite close in here, don't you think?" I muttered.

But this pleasantry too went unheeded. Bending forward, he brought his face up close to mine and, rubbing his long bony fingers vigorously, spoke in a low whisper.

"They were alive, weren't they?"

Before I realized what I was doing,