ently
enough for ten o'clock.

A moonlight walk through the low streets, transfigured by the silver
gleam into fairy vistas--all but the odor--brought him to Herr
Lebensfunke's house. Simple birdling, on the lookout for him, piloted
him through the unsafe channel, and brought him to anchor in the
dimly-lit room.

"All is ready," said the philosopher, as he trembled forward and shook
Ronald's hand. "See here." Zig-zags of silk-bound wire squirmed hither
and thither from the life-magnet. Two of them ended in carbon points.
"And here, too, my young friend, is your new finger."

It lay, detached, in the central globe, and on its severed end atoms
of protoplasm were already clustered. "Literally a second-hand
article," thought Ronald; but, not venturing to translate the idiom,
he only bowed and said, "Ach so!" which means any thing and every
thing in German.

It was not without a very natural sinking of the heart that Ronald
Wyde divested himself of his clothing, and took his position, by the
old man's direction, on the stout table, side by side with the dead. A
flat brass plate pressed between his shoulders, and one of the carbon
points, clamped in a little insulated stand, rested on his bosom and
quivered with the quickened motion of the heart beneath it. The other
point touched the dead man's breast.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes."

The old man pressed a key, and as he did so a sharp sting, hardly
worse than a leech's bite, pricked Ronald Wyde's breast. A sense of
languor crept slowly upon him, his feet tingled, his breath came
slowly, and waves of light and shade pulsed in indistinct alternation
before his sight; but through them the old man's eyes peered into his,
like a dream. Presently Ronald would have started if he could, for
two old philosophers were craning over him instead of one. But as he
looked more steadily, one face softly dimmed into nothing, and the
other grew brighter and stronger in its lines, while the room flushed
with an unaccountable light. The little key clicked once more;
a vague sensation that the current had somehow ceased to flow,
roused him, and he raised himself on his elbow and looked in blank
bewilderment at his own dead self lying by his side in the daylight,
while the sunrise tried to peer through the webbed panes.

"Is it over?" he asked, with a puzzled glance around him; and added,
"Which am I?"

"Either, or both," answered Herr Lebensfunke. "Your identity will be
something of a