Beasts and Super-Beasts

Leonard Bilsiter was one of those people who have failed to find this world attractiveor interesting, and who have sought compensation in an "unseen world" of their ownexperience or imagination-or invention. Children do that sort of thing successfully, butchildren are content to convince themselves, and do not vulgarise their beliefs by tryingto convince other people. Leonard Bilsiter's beliefs were for "the few," that is to say, anyone who would listen to him. His dabblings in the unseen might not have carried him beyond the customaryplatitudes of the drawing-room visionary if accident had not reinforced his stock-intradeof mystical lore. In company with a friend, who was interested in a Ural miningconcern, he had made a trip across Eastern Europe at a moment when the great Russianrailway strike was developing from a threat to a reality; its outbreak caught him on thereturn journey, somewhere on the further side of Perm, and it was while waiting for acouple of days at a wayside station in a state of suspended locomotion that he madethe acquaintance of a dealer in harness and metalware.