Verney put on his spectacles, spread out the paper and read:

I, Otto Helmuth Khune, am making this statement of my free will and while of sound mind in case anything should happen to me, or my sanity later be questioned.

I was born in Chicago on February 8th, 1918, of naturalized American parents who had immigrated from Germany in 1910. They had had six children before the birth of myself and my brother Lothar, we two being my mother's third set of twins. Of the others, three died in infancy, or early childhood, and neither pair of twins was identical, whereas Lothar and I were.

We were the last children born to my parents and the three earlier ones who survived were all girls. One met her death in afire in 1933, the two others married and live in Detroit and Philadelphia respectively. It is now nearly fifteen years since I have seen either of them and neither plays any part in the matter of which I am about to give an account. Both my parents are now dead.

When I state that Lothar and I are identical twins, I mean that literally. Our physical resemblance was so exact that even people who knew us intimately, at times mistook one of us for the other. Mentally, too, we were extraordinarily alike. We had the same tastes in food, recreations and clothes, and almost invariably shared our likes or dislikes of people. As we grew into our 'teens the latter trait began to show some divergence, but mentally we continued to be remarkably attuned.

Neither of us had any difficulty in reading the other's thoughts and frequently we started to say the same thing at the same moment, so that the similarity of our minds became a joke among our acquaintances. The bond was still closer than that for, if one of us felt ill, the other invariably was, almost at once, subject to the same symptoms. This even extended to the demonstrably physical. On one occasion in a fight at school I had my eye blacked; Lothar felt the blow and soon after his eye also closed and coloured up. On another he fell and broke his ankle, upon which I suffered such acute pain in mine that I had to have the same treatment for such a mishap.

Another thing that we had in common was a highly developed psychic sense. It is said that the seventh child of a seventh child is often endowed in this way; and Lothar and I stood in this relation in my mother, who had been a seventh child. She, too, was psychic to some degree. To a limited extent she could see things in a crystal and tell fortunes by cards, and she had had several death warnings that proved true foreknowledge of the event. But her psychic faculties were not so highly developed as those of Lothar and myself.