t was
caught in a panel that slid to just behind her. She struggled to free
herself, and as she did so Parkinson came out of the prisoner's room and
lunged with the spear."

"A panel?" repeated the barrister in a curious voice.

"It was a looking-glass on the other side," explained Father Brown.
"When I was in the dressing-room I noticed that some of them could
probably be slid out into the passage."

There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the
judge who spoke. "So you really mean that when you looked down that
passage, the man you saw was yourself--in a mirror?"

"Yes, my lord; that was what I was trying to say," said Brown, "but they
asked me for the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, and
so I--"

The judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said
in specially distinct tones: "Do you really mean to say that when Sir
Wilson Seymour saw that wild what-you-call-him with curves and a woman's
hair and a man's trousers, what he saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?"

"Yes, my lord," said Father Brown.

"And you mean to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee with
humped shoulders and hog's bristles, he simply saw himself?"

"Yes, my lord."

The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was
hard to separate the cynicism and the admiration. "And can you tell us
why," he asked, "you should know your own figure in a looking-glass,
when two such distinguished men don't?"

Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered:
"Really, my lord, I don't know unless it's because I don't look at it so
often."

FIVE -- The Mistake of the Machine

FLAMBEAU and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens
about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence
had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem
of the licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and
mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third
Degree in America.

"I've been reading," said Flambeau, "of this new psychometric method
they talk about so much, especially in America. You know what I mean;
they put a pulsometer on a man's wrist and judge by how his heart goes
at the pronunciation of certain words. What do you think of it?"

"I think it very interesting," replied Father Brown; "it reminds me
of that interesting idea in the Dark Ages that blood would flow fro