He was soon asleep and supposed that he had remained asleep for perhaps two or three hours. Then suddenly he woke up-yes, he was quite certain that he had woken up rather than drifted into a dream. Sitting up in bed, he had seen an extraordinary sight. The room was lit by a dim light the source of which was unclear. By that light he saw quite clearly that part of the wall at the side of his bed had disappeared and in the gap a staircase had opened up. Half-way down the staircase a man was standing. The light was dim, but it was sufficient to show that the man appeared to be dressed in clothes which my friend described loosely as Tudor. He could make out that the man was wearing a reddish jacket and that on his head he wore a rather floppy kind of cap, rather, he said, like the Canterbury cap which he teases me for wearing sometimes. It seemed to be made of black velvet. But what struck him most forcibly about this spectacle, he said, was not so much the man’s clothes or his stance, but the expression on his face. It was, he said, a look of inexpressible sadness, a sadness such as he had never seen before. The man simply stood on the staircase, perfectly still. He said nothing, there was no movement. Then gradually the dim light by which he was visible began to fade, he became a mere outline, a shadow and then darkness closed in completely. For a few moments Timothy said, he had sat up in bed motionless, too stunned to do anything. And then, seized by a sudden panic, he had reached out for the lamp on his bedside table and switched it on. The floor of light revealed nothing extraordinary. The staircase and its occupant were gone, the wall was just as it had been earlier when he had gone to bed. Nothing was out of place, nothing gave any hint of the apparition which he was perfectly certain he had seen. There is, he said – and I could not argue – a world of difference between what one has seen in a dream and what one has seen with ones eyes and whatever doubts may be raised and entertained by others, we ourselves know quite well how to distinguish the one from the other.