When I asked “What luck?” he turned on me a disconsolate face.

“It is the most futile job I ever took on,” he groaned. “So far it’s an absolute blank, and anyhow I’ve been taking the wrong line. I’ve been trying to think myself into recollection, and, as I said, this thing comes not by searching, nor yet by prayer and fasting. It occurred to me that I might get at something by following up the differences between the three pairs. It’s a familiar method in inductive logic, for differences are often more suggestive than resemblances. So I worried away at the ‘sacred tree’ as contrasted with the ‘Western Highlands’ and the ’fields of Eden‘ as set against the curiosity shop. No earthly good. I gave myself a headache and I dare say I’ve poisoned half my patients. It’s no use, Dick, but I’ll peg away for the rest of the prescribed two days. I’m letting my mind lie fallow now and trusting to inspiration. I’ve got two faint glimmerings of notions. First, I don’t believe I said ’Western Highlands.”“

“I’m positive those were your words. What did you say, then?”

“Hanged if I know, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t that. I can’t explain properly, but you get an atmosphere about certain things in your mind and that phrase somehow jars with the atmosphere. Different key. Wrong tone. Second, I’ve got a hazy intuition that the thing, if it is really in my memory, is somehow mixed up with a hymn tune. I don’t know what tune, and the whole impression is as vague as smoke, but I tell it you for what it is worth. If I could get the right tune, I might remember something.”

“You’ve stopped thinking?”

“Utterly. I’m an Aeolian harp to be played on by any wandering wind. You see, if I did hear these three things there is no conscious rational clue to it. They were never part of my workaday mind. The only chance is that some material phenomenon may come along and link itself with them and so rebuild the scene where I heard them. A scent would be best, but a tune might do. Our one hope—and it’s about as strong as a single thread of gossamer on the grass—is that that tune may drift into my head. You see the point, Dick? Thought won’t do, for the problem doesn’t concern the mind, but some tiny physical sensation of nose, ear, or eye might press the button. Now, it may be hallucination, but I’ve a feeling that the three facts I thought I invented were in some infinitely recondite way connected with a hymn tune.”

He went to bed early, while I sat up till nearly midnight writing letters. As I went upstairs, I had a strong sense of futility and discouragement. It seemed the merest trifling to be groping among these spectral unrealities, while tragedy, as big and indisputable as a mountain, was overhanging us. I had to remind myself how often the trivial was the vital before I got rid of the prick in my conscience.