on. And if
the facts and coincidences should prove less puzzling to others than to
me, a praiseworthy service might be done to humanity by the
presentation of whatever solution a better understanding than mine
might evolve.

The only remaining disclosure which I am prepared now to make is that
my correspondent signed himself "Ramtarg,"--an odd-sounding name, but
for all I know it may be respectable in Sweden. And yet there is
something about the name that haunts me unceasingly, much as does some
strange dream which we know we have dreamt and yet which it is
impossible to remember.

Two Singular Men

The first of these was a powerful Italian, topped with a dense brush of
rebellious black hair. The circumstances leading up to his employment
in the Great Oriental Dime Museum as the "Marvellous Tuft-nosed Wild
Man, Hoolagaloo, captured on the Island of Milo, in the AEgean Sea,
after a desperate struggle," were these:

He had been a wood-chopper, possessed of prodigious strength and a
violent temper. One day he and a companion in the mountains fell out
and fought. The Italian then had to walk twenty miles to find a
surgeon, being in great need of his services. When he presented himself
to the surgeon his face was heavily bandaged with blood-soaked cloths.
He began to fumble in his pockets, and his face betrayed deep anxiety
when he failed to find what he sought.

"What is the matter?" asked the surgeon, "and what are you seeking?"

The man uncovered his mouth and in a voice like the sound of an
ophicleide, answered:

"Mina nosa."

"Your nose!"

"Aha. T'ought I bring 'im, butta no find."

"Brought your nose in your pocket!"

"Dunno--may be losta. Fella fighta me; cut offa da nose."

The surgeon assured him that the severed nose would have been useless.

"But I wanta da nose!" exclaimed the man, in despair.

The surgeon said that he could make a new one, and the man appeared
greatly relieved in mind. A removal of the bandages disclosed the fact
that a considerable part of the nose was gone. The surgeon then
proceeded to perform the familiar rhinoplastic operation, which
consists in making a V-shaped incision through the skin of the forehead
immediately above the nose, loosening it, and bringing it down with a
half-turn, to keep the cuticle outward, and covering the nose-stump
with it. In preparing for this he made an interesting discovery. The
place for the man's nose was long and his forehead low, s