ber
the crowd listened without understanding. Did you thrust a pencil in
their jaws and bid them write their tale? Gone was some little muscle
that grips the jaws and the pencils lolled between teeth that could
not nip them. And as for their lips, oh, their mouths, their mouths!
Such an example of the chirurgery that has to do with the altering of
the human face had never before been witnessed, for nature had never
made those faces. One such countenance she might have made in cruel
sport, but never twelve, and twelve altogether, as like as peas in a
pod, twelve human jack o'lanterns, twelve travesties upon humanity's
front. Howsoever they might once have looked, not even their own
mothers could know them now. Around each eye the same wrinkles led
away. On each face was a bulbous nose. But the mouths, oh, the mouths!
Each was drawn back over the teeth in a perpetual grin, each was
upturned at corners which ended well nigh in the middle of the cheek.
Here were the victims of the horrors that had made the city shudder,
but dumb and unrecognizable. In all the thousands that looked at them,
not one could say he had ever seen them before. In all these
thousands, there was not one to whom they could speak. There were
their stiff faces, frozen into that terrible perpetual grin, so many
idols of wood, save for their eyes, and they were the only things that
lived in their dead faces.

Such rudimentary human beings it would be hard to conceive, and so
after a while it occurred to some one that the same scientific methods
that discover and disclose to us the modes of life, the habits, and
even thoughts of primitive and rudimentary man, might be devoted to
establishing a means of communication with them and unveil the secret
the whole world was eager to know. Accordingly, they were taken to the
University of Chicago and turned over to the department of
anthropology. The learned expounders of this science were not long in
devising a simple means of communication. The twelve unfortunates were
seated upon a recitation bench and a doctor of philosophy wrote out an
alphabet upon the blackboard.

"One rap of your foot will be A," said the doctor of philosophy. "Two
will be B. Two raps, a pause, and one will be C. We will soon learn
your story."

At this moment, the reverberations of a prodigious blow upon the door
outside echoed through the room, "bang, bang--bang, bang, bang--bang."

Unaccountably startled, as if at the hearing of s