that circular patch of light upon the ground there? I want you
to go close to it and look down upon it, and tell me what you see."

Bryce stepped quickly to the illuminated space. He looked down at it;
then he approached nearer; then he carefully placed his feet by its edge
and leaned over further, gazing intently downward, and he exclaimed,
"Good heavens! How did you make the hole?"

At that moment he heard a groan, and, looking across the illuminated
space, he saw Clewe tottering. In the next moment he was stretched upon
the ground in a dead faint.

When Bryce had hurried to the side of his employer and had thrown a
pitcher of water over him, it was not long before Clewe revived. In
answer to Bryce's inquiries he simply replied that he supposed he had
been too much excited by the success of his work.

"You see," said he, "that was not a hole at all that you were looking
into; it was the solid earth made transparent by the Artesian ray. The
thing works perfectly. Please step to that lever and turn it off. I can
stand no more at present."

Bryce moved the lever, and the light upon the ground disappeared. He
approached the place where it had been; it was nothing but common earth.
He put his foot upon it; he stamped; it was as solid as any other part
of the State.

"And yet I have looked down into it," he ejaculated, "at least half a
dozen feet!"

When Bryce turned and went back to Clewe, he too was pale.

"I do not wonder you fainted," said he. "I do not believe it was what
you saw that upset you; it was what you expected to see--wasn't that
it?"

Clewe nodded in an indefinite way. "We won't talk about it now," said
he. "I don't want any more experiments to-day. We will cover up the
instrument and go."

When Roland Clewe reached his room, he sat down in the arm-chair to
think. He had made a grand and wonderful success, but it was not upon
that that his mind was now fixed. It was upon the casual and accidental
effect of the work of his invention, of which he had never dreamed.
Bryce had made a great mistake in thinking that it was not what Roland
Clewe had seen, but what he had expected to see, which had caused him to
drop insensible. It was what he had seen.

When the master-workman had approached the lighted space upon the
ground, Clewe stood opposite to him, a little distance from the
apparatus. As Bryce looked down, he leaned forward more and more,
until the greater part of his body was directly over the