k drifted to hypnotism and the
occult, nor when the current started that way. But one of the reporters
who happened to be driven off the street by the rain one night found
Henry and David in the office with a homemade planchette doing queer
things. They made it tell words in the middle of pages of newspapers
that neither had opened. They made it write answers to sums that neither
had calculated, and they made it give the names of Henry's relatives
dead and gone--also those that were living, whom David, who was
operating it, did not know. The thing would not move for the man, but
the boy's fingers on it made it fly. Some way the triangular board
broke, and the reporter and Henry were pop-eyed with wonder to see David
hold his hands above the pencil and make it write, dragging a splinter
of board behind it. David yawned five or six times and lay down on the
office couch, and when he got up a moment later his hands were fingering
the air, his lips fluttering like the wings of fledglings, and he seemed
to be trying some new kind of lingo. He did not look about him, but went
straight to the table, gripped the air above the pencil with the broken
board upon it, and the pencil came up and began writing something,
evidently in verse. David's face was shiny and smiling the while, but
his eyes were fixed, though his lips moved as they do when one writes
and is unused to it. Larmy stared at the boy with open mouth, clearly
afraid of the spectacle that was before him. A night creaking of the
building made him jump, and he moistened his lips as the pencil wrote
on. When the sheet was filled, the pencil fell and David looked about
him with a smile and dropping his head on the desk began to yawn. He
seemed to be coming out of a deep sleep, and grinned up blinking: "Gee,
I must 'a' gone to sleep on you fellows. I was up late last night."

Larmy told the boy what had happened, and the three of them looked at
the paper, but could make nothing of it. David shook his head.

"Not on your life," he laughed. "What do you fellers take me for--a
phonograph having the D. T.'s, or a mimeograph with a past? Uh-huh! Not
for little David! Why--say, that is some kind of Dutch!"

The reporter knew enough to know that it was Latin, but his High School
days were five years behind him, and he could not translate it. The
Latin professor at the college, however, said that it seemed to be an
imitation of Ovid.

And the next time the reporter saw a light