ing to investigate; the others--rich and poor alike, peer and
peasant--trooped out by thousands on the far journey, without leaving
the faintest footprint to mark the road by which they had gone.

This was perhaps the reason that, after a time, Zaleski discarded the
newspapers, leaving their perusal to me, and turned his attention
exclusively to the ebon tablet. Knowing as I full well did the daring
and success of his past spiritual adventures,--the subtlety, the
imagination, the imperial grip of his intellect,--I did not at all
doubt that his choice was wise, and would in the end be justified.
These woodcuts--now so notorious--were all exactly similar in design,
though minutely differing here and there in drawing. The following is a
facsimile of one of them taken by me at random:

[Illustration]

The time passed. It now began to be a grief to me to see the turgid
pallor that gradually overspread the always ashen countenance of
Zaleski; I grew to consider the ravaging life that glared and blazed in
his sunken eye as too volcanic, demonic, to be canny: the mystery, I
decided at last--if mystery there were--was too deep, too dark, for
him. Hence perhaps it was, that I now absented myself more and more
from him in the adjoining room in which I slept. There one day I sat
reading over the latest list of horrors, when I heard a loud cry from
the vaulted chamber. I rushed to the door and beheld him standing,
gazing with wild eyes at the ebon tablet held straight out in front of
him.

'By Heaven!' he cried, stamping savagely with his foot. 'By Heaven!
Then I certainly _am_ a fool! _It is the staff of Phaebus in the hand
of Hermes!'_

I hastened to him. 'Tell me,' I said, 'have you discovered anything?'

'It is possible.'

'And has there really been foul play--murder--in any of these deaths?'

'Of that, at least, I was certain from the first.'

'Great God!' I exclaimed, 'could any son of man so convert himself into
a fiend, a beast of the wilderness....'

'You judge precisely in the manner of the multitude,' he answered
somewhat petulantly. 'Illegal murder is always a mistake, but not
necessarily a crime. Remember Corday. But in cases where the murder of
one is really fiendish, why is it qualitatively less fiendish than the
murder of many? On the other hand, had Brutus slain a thousand
Caesars--each act involving an additional exhibition of the sublimest
self-suppression--he might well have taken rank as a saint in h