shivers down her back whenever she thought of them.

In his best holiday costume of black velvet puffed with silk he entered
the laboratory, holding himself very erect. The high, arched room was
only dimly lighted by a hanging-lamp, but when Frau Schimmel heard his
steps she shrank together till, as she fancied, she must have become
smaller and less easily discoverable. What she feared was that he might
start the furnace and she should be obliged to reveal herself because of
the heat.

But to her great relief he walked straight into the middle of the
laboratory and stopped directly under the lamp, which was suspended from
the point where the ribs of the vaulting intersected. There he waved a
fresh laurel branch towards every side of the room and called out the
same words and names that he had murmured by the bed-side of his son,
only louder and more imperiously.

To the listener it was perfectly clear that this was an invocation of
spirits, and her knees trembled under her, and her teeth chattered so
audibly that she feared he must hear her. Though she closed her eyes
tightly in order not to see the hellish brood that was about to pervade
that Christian house, fearing that she might be strangled by them or go
mad; yet the unholy creatures must have entered the laboratory obedient
to their master's call for she distinctly heard him greet one of them
solemnly.

As she did not smell any sulphur fumes nor see any dancing flames when
she peeped out from under her half-closed lids, she gathered sufficient
courage to look about her. But she saw nothing save the doctor on his
knees talking into the corner of the laboratory, where there was nothing
but the broom with which she had swept the stone floor that morning, and
the shabby old brown peruke that Herr Schimmel was in the habit of
putting on in the winter when he crossed the court-yard.

These apparitions she knew so intimately that she began to be reassured,
and her confidence once restored she reflected that either the spirits
must have held her unworthy of a sight of them and have been visible only
to the master, or else that the doctor had gone completely out of his
mind. Of her own sanity she had no doubts for her mind was made of
sterner stuff and would therefore be less easily affected.

Whether Doctor Melchior were holding converse with the broom, or the
peruke, or a spectre whom he, and no one else could see Frau Schimmel
could not tell, but she had then rec