the
wrecks of philosophical apparatus dating back two or three
generations--ill-fated ventures on the treacherous main of science.
Here a fat-bellied alembic lolled lazily over in a gleamy sand-bath,
like a beach-lost galleon at ebb-tide; and there a heap of broken
porcelain-tubing and shreds of crucibles lay like bleaching ship-ribs
on a sullen shore. Beyond, by the middle window, stood a furnace,
fireless, and clogged with gray ashes. Two or three solid old-time
tables, built when joiners were more lavish of oaken timber than
nowadays, stood hopelessly littered with retorts, filtering funnels,
lamps, ringstands, and squat-beakers of delicate glass, caked with
long-dried sediment, all alike dust-smirched. Ronald involuntarily
sought for some huge Chaldaic tome, conveniently open at a favorite
spell, or a handy crocodile or two dangling from the square beams
overhead, but saw nothing more formidable than a stray volume of
"Kant's Critique of Pure Reason." Taking this up and glancing at its
fly-leaf, he saw a name written in spidery German script, almost
illegible from its shakiness--"Max Lebensfunke."

"Your name?" he asked.

"Yes, mein Herr," answered the old man, taking the volume and
caressing it like a live thing in his fumbling hands. "This book was
given to me by the great Kant himself," he added.

Reverently replacing it, he advanced a few steps toward the middle of
the room. Ronald followed, and, turning away from the windows, looked
further around him. In striking contrast to the undisturbed disorder,
so redolent of middle-age alchemy, was the big table that flanked the
laboratory through its whole length. It began with a powerful galvanic
battery, succeeded by a wiry labyrinth of coils and helices, with
little keys in front of them like a telegraph-office retired from
business; these gave place to many-necked jars wired together by twos
and threes, like oath-bound patriots plotting treason; beyond them
stood a great glass globe, connected with a sizable air-pump, and
filled with a complexity of shiny wires and glassware; next loomed up
a huge induction-magnet, carefully insulated on solid glass supports;
and at the further extremity of the table lay--a corpse.

Ronald Wyde, in spite of his many-sided experience of
dissection-rooms, and morgues, and other ghastlinesses to which he had
long since accustomed himself from principle, drew back at the
sight--perhaps because he had come to this strange place to