, listening to their theorizings and
witnessing their demonstrations. Never, by word or sign, did I convey to
either the slightest hint of the other's progress, and they respected me
for the seal I put upon my lips.

Lloyd Inwood, after prolonged and unintermittent application, when the
tension upon his mind and body became too great to bear, had a strange
way of obtaining relief. He attended prize fights. It was at one of
these brutal exhibitions, whither he had dragged me in order to tell his
latest results, that his theory received striking confirmation.

"Do you see that red-whiskered man?" he asked, pointing across the ring
to the fifth tier of seats on the opposite side. "And do you see the
next man to him, the one in the white hat? Well, there is quite a gap
between them, is there not?"

"Certainly," I answered. "They are a seat apart. The gap is the
unoccupied seat."

He leaned over to me and spoke seriously. "Between the red-whiskered
man and the white-hatted man sits Ben Wasson. You have heard me speak
of him. He is the cleverest pugilist of his weight in the country. He
is also a Caribbean negro, full-blooded, and the blackest in the United
States. He has on a black overcoat buttoned up. I saw him when he came
in and took that seat. As soon as he sat down he disappeared. Watch
closely; he may smile."

I was for crossing over to verify Lloyd's statement, but he restrained
me. "Wait," he said.

I waited and watched, till the red-whiskered man turned his head as
though addressing the unoccupied seat; and then, in that empty space, I
saw the rolling whites of a pair of eyes and the white double-crescent
of two rows of teeth, and for the instant I could make out a negro's
face. But with the passing of the smile his visibility passed, and the
chair seemed vacant as before.

"Were he perfectly black, you could sit alongside him and not see him,"
Lloyd said; and I confess the illustration was apt enough to make me
well-nigh convinced.

I visited Lloyd's laboratory a number of times after that, and found
him always deep in his search after the absolute black. His experiments
covered all sorts of pigments, such as lamp-blacks, tars, carbonized
vegetable matters, soots of oils and fats, and the various carbonized
animal substances.

"White light is composed of the seven primary colors," he argued to me.
"But it is itself, of itself, invisible. Only by being reflected from
objects do it and the objects become