Now, that is not the only singularity of Gottfried’s structure, although it is the only one that would appeal to the untrained mind.  Careful sounding of Gottfried’s internal arrangements by a well-known surgeon seems to point to the fact that all the other unsymmetrical parts of his body are similarly misplaced.  The right lobe of his liver is on the left side, the left on his right; while his lungs, too, are similarly contraposed.  What is still more singular, unless Gottfried is a consummate actor, we must believe that his right hand has recently become his left.  Since the occurrences we are about to consider (as impartially as possible), he has found the utmost difficulty in writing, except from right to left across the paper with his left hand.  He cannot throw with his right hand, he is perplexed at meal-times between knife and fork, and his ideas of the rule of the road—­he is a cyclist—­are still a dangerous confusion.  And there is not a scrap of evidence to show that before these occurrences Gottfried was at all left-handed.

There is yet another wonderful fact in this preposterous business.  Gottfried produces three photographs of himself.  You have him at the age of five or six, thrusting fat legs at you from under a plaid frock, and scowling.  In that photograph his left eye is a little larger than his right, and his jaw is a trifle heavier on the left side.  This is the reverse of his present living condition.  The photograph of Gottfried at fourteen seems to contradict these facts, but that is because it is one of those cheap “Gem” photographs that were then in vogue, taken direct upon metal, and therefore reversing things just as a looking-glass would.  The third photograph represents him at one-and-twenty, and confirms the record of the others.  There seems here evidence of the strongest confirmatory character that Gottfried has exchanged his left side for his right.  Yet how a human being can be so changed, short of a fantastic and pointless miracle, it is exceedingly hard to suggest.

In one way, of course, these facts might be explicable on the supposition that Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification, on the strength of his heart’s displacement.  Photographs may be faked, and left-handedness imitated.  But the character of the man does not lend itself to any such theory.  He is quiet, practical, unobtrusive, and thoroughly sane, from the Nordau standpoint.  He likes beer, and smokes moderately, takes walking exercise daily, and has a healthily high estimate of the value of his teaching.  He has a good but untrained tenor voice, and takes a pleasure in singing airs of a popular and cheerful character.  He is fond, but not morbidly fond, of reading,—­chiefly fiction pervaded with a vaguely pious optimism,—­sleeps well, and rarely dreams.  He is, in fact, the very last person to evolve a fantastic fable.  Indeed, so far from forcing this story upon the world, he has been singularly reticent on the matter.  He meets enquirers with a certain engaging—­bashfulness is almost the word, that disarms the most suspicious.  He seems genuinely ashamed that anything so unusual has occurred to him.