er the influence of that astounding MEDIUM into whose
hands I had fallen--but I vow I heard Pinto say, with rather a ghastly
grin at the porcelain stool,

"Nay, nefer shague your gory locks at me,
Dou canst not say I did it."

(He pronounced it, by the way, I DIT it, by which I KNOW that Pinto was
a German.)

I heard Pinto say those very words, and sitting on the porcelain stool
I saw, dimly at first, then with an awful distinctness--a ghost--an
eidolon--a form--A HEADLESS MAN seated, with his head in his lap, which
wore an expression of piteous surprise.

At this minute, Mr. Gale entered from the front shop to show a customer
some delf plates; and he did not see--but WE DID--the figure rise up
from the porcelain stool, shake its head, which it held in its hand,
and which kept its eyes fixed sadly on us, and disappear behind the
guillotine.

"Come to the 'Gray's-inn Coffee-house,'" Pinto said, "and I will tell
you how THE NOTCH CAME TO THE AXE." And we walked down Holborn at about
thirty-seven minutes past six o'clock.

If there is anything in the above statement which astonishes the reader,
I promise him that in the next chapter of this little story he will be
astonished still more.

PART II.

"You will excuse me," I said, to my companion, "for remarking, that when
you addressed the individual sitting on the porcelain stool, with his
head in his lap, your ordinarily benevolent features"--(this I confess
was a bouncer, for between ourselves a more sinister and ill-looking
rascal than Mons. P. I have seldom set eyes on)--"your ordinarily
handsome face wore an expression that was by no means pleasing. You
grinned at the individual just as you did at me when you went up to the
cei--, pardon me, as I THOUGHT you did, when I fell down in a fit in
your chambers;" and I qualified my words in a great flutter and tremble;
I did not care to offend the man--I did not DARE to offend the man.
I thought once or twice of jumping into a cab, and flying; of taking
refuge in Day and Martin's Blacking Warehouse; of speaking to a
policeman, but not one would come. I was this man's slave. I followed
him like his dog. I COULD not get away from him. So, you see, I went
on meanly conversing with him, and affecting a simpering confidence.
I remember, when I was a little boy at school, going up fawning and
smiling in this way to some great hulking bully of a sixth-form boy.
So I said in a word, "Your ordinarily handsome