rd to
what they were about to witness without great trepidation, Mr.
Middleton offered to afford her every moral support and such physical
protection as one mortal can assure another when facing the unknown
powers of another world. At the extinguishment of the gas, he took her
left hand, and finding it give a faint tremor, he took the other and
was pleased to note that, so far as her hands gave evidence, thereupon
her fears were quite allayed.

A breeze, chill and dank as the breath of a tomb, blew upon the
company, and from the deep darkness into which they all stared with
straining, unseeing eyes, came the solemn sound of Mr. Smitz, speaking
hurriedly in somber tones in some sonorous unknown tongue, and low
rustlings and whirrs and soft footfalls and faint rattlings that grew
stronger, louder, each moment, swelling up into the stamp of a mailed
heel and the clangor of arms as Mr. Smitz scratched a match and the
light of a gas jet glanced upon helmet, corslet, shield, and greaves
of a brazen-armored Greek warrior, standing in the middle of the
circle, alive, in full corporeal presence!

"Leonidas, hero of Thermopylae!" shouted Mr. Smitz, and then continued
at a conversational pitch, "if any of you wish to speak to him in his
own language, you have full permission to do so."

Those present lacking either the desire to accost the dread presence,
or a command of the ancient Greek, after a bit Mr. Smitz turned off
the gas and the noises that had heralded the visitant's appearance
began in reverse order, and at their cease, the gas being turned on
again, there was the circle quite bare of any evidence that a Greek
warrior in full panoply had but now stood there.

At these prodigies, the young lady trembled, but you could have
applied all sorts of surgical devices for measuring nerve reaction to
Mr. Middleton from the crown of his head to where his parallel feet
held between them the copper bottle, and not have detected a tremor.

Mr. Smitz was reaching up to extinguish the gas once more, when a big,
athletic blonde man, whose appearance and garb proclaimed him an
Englishman, interrupted him.

"I am going to request you to materialize the spirit with whom I wish
to converse, the next time. I have to catch a train at eleven and
there are a number of things I would like to do before that.
Yesterday, you promised me that you would materialize him first
thing."

"Yesterday," said Mr. Smitz with a slight hauteur, "I coul