at Hassan
implacably pursues one object--the slipper. In pursuit of the
slipper, then, the dwarf came here. Bristol!"--I laid my hand upon
his arm, glancing about me with a very real apprehension--"the
slipper must be somewhere near!"

Bristol turned to the constable standing hard by.

"Remain here," he ordered. Then to me: "I should like you to come
up on to the roof. From there we can survey the ground and perhaps
arrive at some explanation of how the dwarf came to fall upon that
spot."

Passing the constable on duty at one of the doorways and making our
way through the group of loiterers there, we ascended amid
conflicting odours to the topmost floor. A ladder was fixed against
the wall communicating with a trap in the ceiling. Several
individuals in their shirt sleeves and all smoking clay pipes had
followed us up. Bristol turned upon them.

"Get downstairs," he said--"all the lot of you, and stop there!"

With muttered imprecations our audience dispersed, slowly returning
by the way they had come. Bristol mounted the ladder and opened the
trap. Through the square opening showed a velvet patch spangled
with starry points. As he passed up on to the roof and I followed
him, the comparative cleanness of the air was most refreshing after
the varied fumes of the staircase.

Side by side we leaned upon the parapet looking down into the dirty
courtyard which was the theatre of this weird mystery; looking down
upon the stage, sordidly Western, where a mystic Eastern tragedy
had been enacted.

I could see the constable standing beside the crushed thing upon
the stones.

"Now," said Bristol, with a sort of awe in his voice, "where did he
fall from?"

And at his words, looking down at the spot where the dwarf lay, and
noting that he could not possibly have fallen there from any of the
buildings surrounding the courtyard, an eerie sensation crept over
me; for I was convinced that the happening was susceptible of no
natural explanation.

I had heard--who has not heard?--of the Indian rope trick, where
a fakir throws a rope into the air which remains magically suspended
whilst a boy climbs upward and upward until he disappears into space.
I had never credited accounts of the performance; but now I began
seriously to wonder if the arts of Hassan of Aleppo were not as
great or greater than the arts of fakir. But the crowning mystery
to my mind was that of the Hashishin's death. It would seem that
as he h