Karl Grier

The chief actor in the singular, perhaps unprecedented, incidents herein recorded now leads a sedate existence of British top-hatted respectability. Many reputable citizens of London and Edinburgh, not to mention cosmopolitan Paris and New York, to whom he is personally known, would be exceedingly surprised were they to recognize, through the thin disguise of places and people, the popular man of the world whose extraordinary career is now set forth for the first time.

Some few there are who dimly comprehend Karl Grier’s secret. They, for reasons that shall be obvious, will keep their amazed imaginings locked in their own hearts. Others, men of precise science for the most part, who have been approached in order that certain remarkable phenomena might be sanely investigated, refute with scorn the suggestion that such a person ever lived. That is to say, they cannot deny Karl Grier, with his giant frame and his hearty whole-souled laugh, but they do deny most emphatically that he ever possessed the unknown power which he exercised in a marvelous way during several eventful years.

If aught could make Karl angry, it is the stupid agnosticism of these learned critics, true children of the dull tribe which began, ages ago, to create its own unbending gods of stone and wood, and has been setting up barriers to knowledge ever since, building dogmatic walls the crossing of which is forbidden by bell, book, and candle.

Yet it is not within my province to rail against these infallibles, who smile at the density which imprisoned Galileo in the sixteen hundreds, but refuse to-day’s evidence of a new realm in man’s mental activity. Sometimes Karl has been tempted, with me, his biographer, as tempter, to place before an astounded world such an array of facts as must convert these scoffers into perfervid disciples. He has been deterred--and here I may claim some credit, too--by personal considerations, by dread of the fierce light of publicity being shed on those near and dear to him, and, in lesser degree, by the fact that a settled, happy existence has stifled the weird and subtle sense which was vouchsafed to him during the growth and plentitude of his bodily and spiritual powers. So, peace be to the critics. “Eppur si muove!” sighed the astronomer, recanting the truth to save his life.

For, without further preamble be it said, my friend Grier was endowed with, or permitted by Providence to use, a sixth sense, which he and I, seeking its correct classification in after years, named telegnomy, or far-knowing. That is the nearest the vocabulary of our times will approach to the description of his mysterious faculty. Strictly speaking, it was not a new sense, as one differentiates seeing from hearing, or taste from touch. Purists in words may even quarrel with me for using the term “sense” to denote a transcendental union of reason with physical attributes. But, in writing a quaint, almost sensational, narrative of actual occurrences, it is well to be content with the simple phraseology of every-day life, and, in that well-defined vehicle of plain thought, the faculty vouchsafed to Karl Grier was a sense.

Its stupendous range, its curiously rational limitations, will be grasped only by an intelligent reading of these memoirs. So a truce to the “Yea” and “Nay” of theorists. Let the story, or group of queer incidents, as it may be termed, speak for itself.