“Really and truly I do,” I said, holding his gaze as long as I could, for I wanted him to be convinced.

He was a short, squat man, with a jutting lower lip, a broad fore head, wispy sideboards, and rather ugly ears. He was young about twenty-five, I believe, two decades younger than myself — yet his lank hair was already receding. His walk had a sort of bounce and he had a certain energy about him nervous, like a plump bird — but he always looked sickly: I know he suffered hemorrhages, from time to time, from a soccer-game kicking to the kidneys he had received when working as a teacher in some Godforsaken private school in Wales. And today his blue eyes, though tired, were filled, as ever, with intelligence and a concern for me.

My friend worked as a teacher — at that time, of pupils by correspondence — but he was a dreamer. At our enjoyable Thursday-night dinner parties in Richmond, he would pour out his speculations on the future and the past, and share with us his latest thoughts on the meaning of Darwin’s bleak, Godless analysis, and what-not. He dreamed of the perfectibility of the human race — he was just the type, I knew, who would wish with all his heart that my tales of time travel were true!

I call him “Writer” out of an old kindness, I suppose, for as far as I knew he had only had published various awkward speculations in college journals and the like; but I had no doubt that his lively brain would carve him out a niche in the world of letters of some sort — and, more to the point, he had no doubt of it either.

Though I was eager to be off, I paused a moment. Perhaps the Writer could serve as my witness on this new voyage — in fact, I wondered now, it could be that he was already planning to write up my earlier adventures in some gaudy form for publication.

Well, he would have my blessing!

“I only want half an hour,” I said, calculating that I could return to this precise time and place with a mere touch of the levers of my machine, no matter how long I chose to spend in the future or past. “I know why you came, and it’s awfully good of you. There’s some magazines here. If you’ll stop to lunch I’ll prove you this time traveling up to the hilt, specimens and all. If you’ll forgive my leaving you now?”