stood over it until it was reduced to a formless
grey ash.

"Now, Master B.," said he, "I think I have pretty well drawn your
teeth. You'll hear from me again, if you return to your old tricks.
And now good-morning, for I must go back to my studies."

And such is the narrative of Abercrombie Smith as to the singular
events which occurred in Old College, Oxford, in the spring of '84. As
Bellingham left the university immediately afterwards, and was last
heard of in the Soudan, there is no one who can contradict his
statement. But the wisdom of men is small, and the ways of nature are
strange, and who shall put a bound to the dark things which may be
found by those who seek for them?

THE LOS AMIGOS FIASCO.

I used to be the leading practitioner of Los Amigos. Of course,
everyone has heard of the great electrical generating gear there. The
town is wide spread, and there are dozens of little townlets and
villages all round, which receive their supply from the same centre, so
that the works are on a very large scale. The Los Amigos folk say that
they are the largest upon earth, but then we claim that for everything
in Los Amigos except the gaol and the death-rate. Those are said to be
the smallest.

Now, with so fine an electrical supply, it seemed to be a sinful waste
of hemp that the Los Amigos criminals should perish in the
old-fashioned manner. And then came the news of the eleotrocutions in
the East, and how the results had not after all been so instantaneous
as had been hoped. The Western Engineers raised their eyebrows when
they read of the puny shocks by which these men had perished, and they
vowed in Los Amigos that when an irreclaimable came their way he should
be dealt handsomely by, and have the run of all the big dynamos. There
should be no reserve, said the engineers, but he should have all that
they had got. And what the result of that would be none could predict,
save that it must be absolutely blasting and deadly. Never before had
a man been so charged with electricity as they would charge him. He
was to be smitten by the essence of ten thunderbolts. Some prophesied
combustion, and some disintegration and disappearance. They were
waiting eagerly to settle the question by actual demonstration, and it
was just at that moment that Duncan Warner came that way.

Warner had been wanted by the law, and by nobody else, for many years.
Desperado, murderer, train robber and road agent, he