ve been impossible to prove such a charge, and besides, I
had made oath to my sister that I would use the man only for these
soul-experiments. What are his crimes compared with the great secret of
knowledge I am now able to give the world?"

"A secret of knowledge?"

"Yes," said the savant, with intense earnestness, "I may tell you now,
doctor, what the whole world will know, ere long, that it is possible to
compel every living person to reveal the innermost secrets of his or her
life, so long as memory remains, for memory is only the power of
producing in the brain material pictures that may be projected
externally by the thought rays and made to impress themselves upon the
photographic plate, precisely as ordinary pictures do."

"You mean," I exclaimed, "that you can photograph the two principles of
good and evil that exist in us?"

"Exactly that. The great truth of a dual soul existence, that was dimly
apprehended by one of your Western novelists, has been demonstrated by
me in the laboratory with my camera. It is my purpose, at the proper
time, to entrust this precious knowledge to a chosen few who will
perpetuate it and use it worthily."

"Wonderful, wonderful!" I cried, "and now tell me, if you will, about
the house on the Rue Picpus. Did you ever visit the place?"

"We did, and found that no buildings had stood there for fifty years, so
we did not pursue the search."[1]

[Footnote 1: Years later, some workmen in Paris, making excavations in
the Rue Picpus, came upon a heavy door buried under a mass of debris,
under an old cemetery. On lifting the door they found a vault-like
chamber in which were a number of female skeletons, and graven on the
walls were blasphemous words written in French, which experts declared
dated from fully two hundred years before. They also declared this
handwriting identical with that found on the door at the Water Street
murder in New York. Thus we may deduce a theory of fiend reincarnation;
for it would seem clear, almost to the point of demonstration, that this
murder of the seventeenth century was the work of the same evil soul
that killed the poor woman on Water Street towards the end of the
nineteenth century.]

"And the writing on the card, have you any memory of it, for Burwell
told me that the words have faded?"

"I have something better than that; I have a photograph of both card and
writing, which my sister was careful to take. I had a notion that the
ink in my pock