al spectacles on his substantial nose, he went into
Carinthia and ascended the great Venice mountains, much as he would
have performed any other scientific experiment. Then he encamped on
the shores of the Pasterzen glacier, and proceeded to make a study of
it.

So it happened that the Doctor, taking a morning stroll over the
subject of his experiment, in search of small things which might
verify his theory, met Mrs. Knollys sitting in her accustomed place.
The Doctor had been much puzzled, that morning, on finding in a rock
at the foot of the glacier the impression, or sign-manual as it were,
of a certain fish, whose acquaintance the Doctor had previously made
only in tropical seas. This fact seeming, superficially, to chime in
with Spluethnerian mistakes in a most heterodox way, the Doctor's mind
had for a moment been diverted from the ice; and he was wondering what
the fish had been going to do in that particular gallery, and secretly
doubting whether it had known its own mind, and gone thither with the
full knowledge and permission of its maternal relative. Indeed, the
good Doctor would probably have ascribed its presence to the malicious
and personal causation of the devil, but that the one point on which
he and Spluethner were agreed was the ignoring of unscientific
hypotheses. The Doctor's objections to the devil were none the less
strenuous for being purely scientific.

Thus ruminating, the Doctor came to the crevasse where Mrs. Knollys
was sitting, and to which a little path had now been worn from the
inn. There was nothing of scientific interest about the fair young
English girl, and the Doctor did not notice her; but he took from his
waistcoat-pocket a leaden bullet, moulded by himself, and marked
"Johannes Carpentarius, Juvavianus, A. U. C. 2590," and dropped it,
with much satisfaction, into the crevasse. Mrs. Knollys gave a little
cry; the bullet was heard for some seconds tinkling against the sides
of the chasm; the tinkles grew quickly fainter, but they waited in
vain for the noise of the final fall. "May the Spluethner live that he
may learn by it," muttered the Doctor; "I can never recover it."

Then he remembered that the experiment had been attended with a sound
unaccounted for by the conformity of the bullet to the laws of
gravitation; and looking up he saw Mrs. Knollys in front of him, no
longer crying, but very pale. Zimmermann started, and in his confusion
dropped his best brass registering the