wl of delicately flavored sherbet, Achmed began to
narrate The Unpleasant Adventure of the Faithless Woman.

_The Unpleasant Adventure of the Faithless Woman._

Dr. August Moehrlein, Ph. D., was a professor of the languages and
religions of India. A man of great gravity of countenance and of
impressive port, he was popularly reputed to have a complete knowledge
of the occult learning of the adepts of India, that nebulous and
mysterious philosophy which irreducible to the laws of nature as
recognized by Occidentals, is by them pronounced either magic and
feared as such, or ridiculed and despised as pretentious mummery and
deluding prestidigitation. There was a legend among the students of
his department that he was wont to project himself into the fourth
dimension and thus traveling downtown, effect a substantial saving of
street-car fare. This is clearly impossible, for the yogis do not thus
move about in their own persons. It is only the astral self that flies
leagues through the air with the rapidity of thought, only the
spiritual essence, the living man's ghost flying abroad while the
living man's corpse lies inanimate at home. But even this, Dr. August
Moehrlein could not do, for the yogis do not initiate men of Western
nations into their mysteries. Dr. Moehrlein's knowledge of the occult
of India was wholly empirical. He knew that certain things were done
and could recount them, but as to how they were done, he could tell
nothing. It must not be thought that of all the marvelous and
awe-compelling things the yogis of India are accustomed to do, none
can be assigned to any other origin than cunning legerdemain and
hypnotism, or to the exercise of supernatural powers. Many of them are
due to a strange and wonderful knowledge of nature which the science
of the Occident has not yet reached in all its boasted advance. Yet
when once explained, the Westerner understands some of these phenomena
and is able to repeat them. Into this region of the penumbra of
science and exact knowledge the researches of Dr. Moehrlein had taken
him a little way and it was this that had gained him his reputation
among his pupils as a thaumaturgist.

Along with the learning which this country has imported from Germany
have come some customs to which the savants of both that country and
this ascribe a certain fostering influence, if not a creative impulse,
highly advantageous to the national scholarship. It is the habit of
the univer