It was an unusually warm day, for April, and the park was crowded: not only the usual tourists, who moved in slow, regulated procession in consultation with their guide-pamphlets, but families taking in the sun and young couples strolling arm-in-arm. The lively swell of laughter and conversation was an odd match for the bare, clawlike trees and the solemn monuments, whose bronze faces and stone plinths rose like stern, cold pillars out of a sea of human warmth.

He stood out from the crowds of the park, as he stood out everywhere. His hair was silvered over, his nose grown more hawklike, but still unmistakeable, slim and straight and striking. The energy of the holiday-makers seemed neither to catch him up nor to disturb him as he wove his own way across the fallow public square. When the press of people before him became too thick, he would pause, and allow his eyes to rove over the crowd speculatively, as if working out a calculation in his mind.

He stopped at each monument in turn, scanning it carefully as if harvesting the words from their cut stone or bronze embossment. He seemed untroubled by the gathered crowd in front of the bronze soldier who stood at attention to commemorate the lives lost in the Boer War.

But the crowds were thinner at the edge of the park, and he stood by himself, as straight and lonely as the barren trees on the fallow green, as he paused to read over the unprepossessing granite square that stood there.

On 23rd August 1878, the balloon PIONEER made its first ascent, and with it launched
not only the ROYAL ENGINEERS SCHOOL OF BALLOONING but also the DREAMS OF A NATION. This
monument stands to honor the labors of those members of the ROYAL ENGINEERS who, under the leadership of
CAPTAIN JAMES TEMPLER
brought this great achievement to fruition.

THOMAS ATKINS
JOSEPH BURDOCK
JOHN CAPPER
ALFRED HODGES
ROBERT PETERSEN
JOHN WATSON
LAWRENCE YOUNG

It was the last monument in the park; a few more steps brought him to the road, where he turned toward the city center and left the park, its crowds, and its monuments behind him.

That is the only time I have seen him, since I stepped off the deck of the Challenger so many years ago. He did not see me; he had no reason to look for James Lindsay in an Aldershot Park. I had known I might see him that afternoon, for the local folk had been astir for days, eager for their chance to hear the lectures that had made him the toast of the Columbian Exposition two years prior. Looking back, I sometimes cannot help but wish that I had approached and spoken to him. But I felt then - and I still believe - that it would have been a mistake. Our lives had both moved on, far beyond what they had been when last we parted; and I did not want the first words I ever spoke to him to come so far after the dissolution of our intimacy. And so I let him pass by, let that precious portion of the past remain intact, and kept my footing firm in the course on which chance and Providence have since directed me. After all, the account of my brief, blessed time spent in the company of Sherlock Holmes is only one of the stories I have that is drawn from my own adventures, even if it remains the best.