e enough to send all our thirty-three millions of
Italians to sleep for ever!"

Kalmon laughed pleasantly.

"If this could be properly used, civilisation would make a gigantic
stride," he added. "In war, for instance, how infinitely pleasanter and
more aesthetic it would be to send the enemy to sleep, with the most
delightful dreams, never to wake again, than to tear people to pieces
with artillery and rifle bullets, and to blow up ships with hundreds of
poor devils on board, who are torn limb from limb by the explosion."

"The difficulty," observed the Contessa, "would be to induce the enemy
to take your poison quietly. What if the enemy objected?"

"I should put it into their water supply," said Kalmon.

"Poison the water!" cried the Signora Corbario. "How barbarous!"

"Much less barbarous than shedding oceans of blood. Only think--they
would all go to sleep. That would be all."

[Illustration: "'I CALL IT THE SLEEPING DEATH,' ANSWERED THE PROFESSOR"]

"I thought," said Corbario, almost carelessly, "that there was no longer
any such thing as a poison that left no traces or signs. Can you not
generally detect vegetable poisons by the mode of death?"

"Yes," answered the Professor, returning the glass tube to its case and
the latter to his pocket. "But please to remember that although we can
prove to our own satisfaction that some things really exist, we cannot
prove that any imaginable thing outside our experience cannot possibly
exist. Imagine the wildest impossibility you can think of; you will not
induce a modern man of science to admit the impossibility of it as
absolute. Impossibility is now a merely relative term, my dear Corbario,
and only means great improbability. Now, to illustrate what I mean, it
is altogether improbable that a devil with horns and hoofs and a fiery
tail should suddenly appear, pick me up out of this delightful circle,
and fly away with me. But you cannot induce me to deny the possibility
of such a thing."

"I am so glad to hear you say that," said the Signora, who was a
religious woman.

Kalmon looked at her a moment and then broke into a peal of laughter
that was taken up by the rest, and in which the good lady joined.

"You brought it on yourself," she said at last.

"Yes," Kalmon answered. "I did. From your point of view it is better to
admit the possibility of a mediaeval devil with horns than to have no
religion at all. Half a loaf is better than no bread."

"Is that st