bed, the piece of papyrus with
which the professor had been toying in the earlier part of the day, and
had removed it. But, as he was on the point of leaving the room, he
happened to approach the corpse once more, and bending over it, noticed
that the lips and teeth were slightly parted. Drawing open the now
stiffened jaws, he found--to his amazement, to his stupefaction--that,
neatly folded beneath the dead tongue, lay just such another piece of
papyrus as that which he had removed from the bed. He drew it out--it
was clammy. He put it to his nose,--it exhaled the fragrance of honey.
He opened it,--it was covered by figures. He compared them with the
figures on the other slip,--they were just so similar as two
draughtsmen hastily copying from a common model would make them. The
doctor was unnerved: he hurried homeward, and immediately submitted the
honey on the papyrus to a rigorous chemical analysis: he suspected
poison--a subtle poison--as the means of a suicide, grotesquely,
insanely accomplished. He found the fluid to be perfectly
innocuous,--pure honey, and nothing more.

The next day Germany thrilled with the news that Professor
Schleschinger had destroyed himself. For suicide, however, some of the
papers substituted murder, though of neither was there an atom of
actual proof. On the day following, three persons died by their own
hands in Berlin, of whom two were young members of the medical
profession; on the day following that, the number rose to nineteen,
Hamburg, Dresden, and Aachen joining in the frenzied death-dance;
within three weeks from the night on which Professor Schleschinger met
his unaccountable end, eight thousand persons in Germany, France, and
Great Britain, died in that startlingly sudden and secret manner which
we call 'tragic', many of them obviously by their own hands, many, in
what seemed the servility of a fatal imitativeness, with figured,
honey-smeared slips of papyrus beneath their tongues. Even now--now,
after years--I thrill intensely to recall the dread remembrance; but to
live through it, to breathe daily the mawkish, miasmatic atmosphere,
all vapid with the suffocating death--ah, it was terror too deep,
nausea too foul, for mortal bearing. Novalis has somewhere hinted at
the possibility (or the desirability) of a simultaneous suicide and
voluntary return by the whole human family into the sweet bosom of our
ancient Father--I half expected it was coming, had come, _then_. It was
a