oks, but I made
such representations that they cut their red tape for once; and I soon
read enough to wonder whether my grave and reverend seignior was quite all
there. Spiritualism one knows, but here was spiritualism with a
difference; psychic photography one had heard about, but here was a
psychical photographer gone mad or bad! When a gifted creature puts into
admirable English his longing to snap-shoot the souls of murderers coming
up through the drop, like the clown at Drury Lane, you begin to want him
elected to a fauteuil in Broadmoor. Will you believe me when I tell you
that I stumbled mentally on the very thing I shall presently prove to have
been the truth, and that I dismissed it from my mind as the wildest
impossibility?"

"I don't see how you're going to prove it now," remarked Mr. Upton, who
hoped there would be no such proof, for the sake of the girl who had been
good to his boy; but that was a private consideration which there was no
necessity to express.

"I shall want another chat with your lad when he's had his sleep out,"
replied Thrush, significantly; "he's told me quite enough to make me eager
for more. But you haven't told me anything about your own adventures?"

And he got another drink to help him listen; for as a rule the ironmaster
was only succinct when thoroughly irate. But now for once he was both
brief and amiable.

"What have I to tell compared with you?" he asked. "Those damned old
wooden walls only cleared the Thames on Sunday morning, and they weren't
near Plymouth when I left last night; but my little aluminium lot broke
all her records before I broke one of her wheels. What I want to know is
what you did from the time I left on Sunday night to that great moment
this morning."

"I sat down to watch Baumgartner, his house," replied Thrush. "The merit
of those quiet little streets is that there are always apartments of
sorts, though not always the most admirable sort, to be had in half the
houses. There was quite a choice bang opposite Baumgartner's, and I'd
taken a front room before you were through Hammersmith. Of course I
explained that I had lost a last train, and the landlady's son embarrassed
me with pyjamas of inadequate dimensions. Well, I sat at the front window
all night, for no better reasons than my strong feeling about the doctor's
writings, and your daughter's disbelief in his yarn about her brother.
Soon after five in the morning the old bird came out, an