he late afternoon sun.

"The other," he said, "is an automaton. I have named it the Sheik of
Baalbec. But I believe he calls himself the Player of the Rolling Eye."

It is impossible for me to say why the mere mention of the fanciful name
of an automatic chessplayer should have caused me to feel a peculiar
uneasiness--the sensation of apprehension. I am not susceptible
ordinarily to the so-called warnings of voices from within. And yet I
suppose the Judge saw a look of inquiry on my face, for he drew out his
large, old-fashioned gold watch, which he carried in his trousers
pocket, with his keys.

"We will stop there," said he. "There is time. The automaton has a
corner of the lower hallway in the old Natural History Museum. It's not
far out of our way, and if you will start with a problem I will give you
and play with him, it will afford me an opportunity to measure you
before our game this evening."

Such were the circumstances which brought me into a mystery not yet
solved, the ending of which I fear to guess. In a modern era, when it is
commonly supposed that skeletons no longer hang in closets, that day
after day brings commonplace occurrences or, at the best, trivial
abnormalities to be explained to-morrow, that romance is dead, it is
strange that Fate should have picked me, when, by custom and my own
desire, I am aloof from all things turbulent, morbid, and uncanny, to
play an unwilling part in so extraordinary a drama, or, possibly, a
tragedy.

At any rate, that day found me face to face with the half-human
personality which the Judge had named the Sheik of Baalbec, and whose
eye has cast an evil cloud upon my life.

Of course I do not know whether you are familiar with the old Natural
History Society and its musty exhibit. A controversy about a curator in
1873 had caused the formation of the new American Institution of
Biology. A few old men continued thereafter to support the ancient
Society by annual subscription, and when they died, one or two of them,
acting from stubborn partizanship, left the museum tied up with trusts
and legacies, preventing the sale of a valuable city property and yet
not furnishing enough to keep the building in repair or dust the case
containing "Beavers at Work." Finally the old museum, once the pride of
the municipality, had come down to the disgraceful necessity of letting
its lower floor to a ten-cent exhibition of respectable waxworks, the
principal attraction of which was