ngling his bristly red
head forward and smiling pleasantly.

The professor seemed abashed of a sudden.

"H'm! Your pardon, gentlemen! Merely an expletive--h'm--a Greek word I
indulge in sometimes when--when excited; a weakness, I might say. H'm!"
He seized his lens again.

Billings' eyes yielded admiration.

"Great Scott, Dicky!" he whispered in my ear. "See what a thing
education is! Think of being able to swear _in Greek_--in Greek, Dicky!"
Billings' voice expressed awe. "Why, he's got an Erie Canal skipper
backed clear off the board, and if he wanted to turn loose, I'll bet he
could make a certain railway president I know look like a two-spot!"

At this point the professor struck his fist angrily upon the pajamas.
The face that he turned was unnaturally flushed and his chin quivered
excitedly.

"Ridiculous, I say! Poof!" He snapped his fingers. "Necromancy and
thaumaturgy transmitted in pajamas! Absurd!"

"Piffle!" said Billings emphatically. "Don't know what they are," he
whispered to me, "but I'll take a hundred-to-one shot on anything he
says. The professor's a corker!"

"By Jove!" I remarked. "Perhaps Professor Huckleberry won't mind telling
us--"

"What I think, gentlemen? What _could_ I think but what I am sure is
your own conclusion--though you have generously and considerately left
me to form my own opinion--namely, that the claim of supernatural
attributes of these garments is preposterous. Enchanted pajamas! Haunted
pajamas! Poof! Nursery lore; children's fairy tales! Ghosts, gentlemen?
Tut, tut--nonsense!"

He snorted indignantly.

"Ghosts!" faltered Billings.

"Oh, I say!" I rather gasped. Dash me if it didn't give me a turn,
rather!

The professor shrugged his shoulders.

"What other interpretation is admissible, gentlemen?" he questioned
somewhat peevishly, taking up the coat. "Here we have the royal insignia
of the cruel emperor, Kee, and we note that these garments were given
some one in his court by the alleged sorcerer, Fuh-keen. Perhaps it was
revenge--perhaps some court plot in which Fuh-keen, for reasons of his
own, was an active participant; it is of no importance, that part of it.
So much for the first line: but now we come--"

He paused to polish his spectacles.

"Tell me," he said more cheerfully, "do our free translations of the
ideographs so far agree in essentials--eh?"

"Like as two peas!" Billings declared with manifest enthusiasm.

The professor looked gratifi