Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair—and then sat down and
reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he
never changed his voice from the quiet, gently-flowing key to which he turned the initial sentence, he
never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm—but all through the interminable narrative there ran
a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that so far from his imagining
that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter,
and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse. To me, the spectacle of a man
drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling was exquisitely absurd. As I said
before, I asked him to tell me what he knew of Rev. Leonidas W. Smily, and he replied as follows. I let
him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once: