al exultation under very modestly, saying that
all credit that might be due was owing not to him, but to the great
organization. We were merely offered a proof, he said, of what the
anarchist body could encompass when once their machinery was put in
motion. And then, having given us the broad fact, he proceeded to show
out details. Or rather, to be strictly accurate, he gave us a string of
results, without any hint as to how they had been arrived at, a certain
amount of mystery being the salt without which no secret society could
possibly exist.

Put briefly and in its order of happening, the story ran as follows:--

The raider, as we had already faintly surmised, was none other than the
man with the spectacles in the Genovese _caffe_. His name was
Pether--N. Congleton Pether; he was of Jewish extraction, and he was
stone-blind. He had been much in Africa, and it was in the southern
part of that continent that an accident deprived him of his sight. The
injured eyeballs had been surgically removed, and artificial ones
mounted in their stead. The man was clever in the extreme in hiding his
infirmity; for a week none of the hotel people where he was staying in
Genoa even guessed at it. Casual acquaintances scarcely ever detected
the missing sense.

English being his native tongue, Pether had naturally lost no word of
the discussion over Weems's manuscript, and directly the little
schoolmaster and myself had left the _caffe_ he had beckoned his
servant Sadi, who was within call, and had gone off on his arm towards
the harbour. There he threw money about right and left, and the
information he wanted was given glibly. A freight steamer consigned to
some senna merchants would be sailing for Tripoli at noon on the
morrow. To the skipper of this craft he betook himself, and bargained
to be set down unostentatiously in Minorca. It would mean a very slight
deviation from the fixed course, and what he paid would be money into
that skipper's own pocket. You see Pether knew how to set about
matters. Had he gone to the shipowners, he would as likely as not have
failed, or at any rate been charged an exorbitant fee; but by applying
to a badly paid Italian seaman who was not above cooking a log, he got
what he wanted for a thousand-franc note.

The senna steamer made for neither Ciudadella nor Port Mahon. Her
doings were a trifle dark, and she did not want to be reported. But her
skipper was a man of local knowledge, and remembered