clothe his thoughts. "For 'a burnt child fears the fire,'
says your English adage. But Mr. Commissioner Nayland Smith, who
enjoys the confidence of the India Office, and who is empowered to
control the movements of the Criminal Investigation Department, learns
nothing from experience. He is less than a child, since he has twice
rashly precipitated himself into a chamber charged with an anaesthetic
prepared, by a process of my own, from the _lycoperdon_ or Common
Puffball."

I became fully master of my senses, and I became fully alive to a
stupendous fact. At last it was ended; we were utterly in the power of
Dr. Fu Manchu; our race was run.

I sat in a low vaulted room. The roof was of ancient brickwork, but
the walls were draped with exquisite Chinese fabric having a green
ground whereon was a design representing a grotesque procession of
white peacocks. A green carpet covered the floor, and the whole of the
furniture was of the same material as the chair to which I was
strapped, viz. ebony inlaid with ivory. This furniture was scanty.
There was a heavy table in one corner of the dungeonesque place, on
which were a number of books and papers. Before this table was a
high-backed, heavily carven chair. A smaller table stood upon the
right of the only visible opening, a low door partially draped with
bead-work curtains, above which hung a silver lamp. On this smaller
table, a stick of incense, in a silver holder, sent up a pencil of
vapour into the air, and the chamber was loaded with the sickly sweet
fumes. A faint haze from the incense-stick hovered up under the roof.

In the high-backed chair sat Dr. Fu Manchu, wearing a green robe upon
which was embroidered a design, the subject of which at first glance
was not perceptible, but which presently I made out to be a huge white
peacock. He wore a little cap perched upon the dome of his amazing
skull, and one clawish hand resting upon the ebony of the table, he
sat slightly turned toward me, his emotionless face a mask of
incredible evil. In spite of, or because of, the high intellect
written upon it, the face of Dr. Fu-Manchu was more utterly repellent
than any I have ever known, and the green eyes, eyes green as those of
a cat in the darkness, which sometimes burnt like witch-lamps, and
sometimes were horribly filmed like nothing human or imaginable, might
have mirrored not a soul, but an emanation of Hell, incarnate in this
gaunt, high-shouldered body.

Stretched f