hen they see the whip. "I do assure you--"

"I seem to recollect," interrupted Sir Elkin, "your saying that
considerable sums of public money were spent on our laboratories.
The grant allocated to this College for research was so munificent
that, after building a physiological laboratory with a small
lecture-theatre, we had to house the professor himself in a
match-boarded room covered with corrugated iron. Between them"--
he turned to me in swift explanation--"they made a furnace. . . .
Yes, Mr. Farrell, and you asked why, if all is well inside my
laboratories, I should fear the light. You would insist on knowing
what you were paying for. . . . Well, here is the answer, sir--if it
meet your demand."

In the clearing where Jack's laboratory stood surrounded by turf and
a ring of conifers, a dozen firemen were busy coiling and packing
lengths of hose. The fire had been beaten; its last gasp was out;
and the main building stood, smoke-stained, water-stained, with
gaping sockets for windows, but with its roof apparently intact.
The trees were scorched to leeward, and the turf was a trampled
morass. Charred benches and desks, broken bottles, retorts, and
glass cases, bestrewed it. But of Jack's sanctum--of the room in
which I had been allowed to sit while he worked, because, as he put
it, "I made no noise with my pipe"--nothing remained save a mound of
ashes and a few sheets of iron roofing, buckled and contorted.
A thin wisp of smoke coiled up from the ruin.

"Jack!" I called.

"Let's try the theatre," Sir Elkin suggested. "I left him there."

We went in.

The rostrum Jack used for his lectures was low, flat-topped and
semicircular, with a high raised desk in the middle. Being isolated,
it had escaped the fire; as maybe it had proved too cumbrous for
removal.

Anyhow, there it was; and Jack stood beside it busy with something he
was laying out on the flat desk-top. It looked like some sort of
jigsaw puzzle that he was piecing together very carefully, very--
what's the word?--meticulously. He had a small heap of oddments on
his left, and a silk handkerchief in his right hand. His game was,
he picked out an oddment from the heap, polished it, fitted it more
or less into the silly puzzle, and stepped back to eye it. He looked
up, annoyed-like, as if we were breaking in on a delicate experiment.

"Drop that, Foe!" Sir Elkin commanded, sharp and harsh, but with a
human tremble in his voice. His nails cla