t plainly. I cannot get the name under which you ruled. I
look into the abyss and the cries of your victims drown it. Horror piles
upon horror!"

Bean was leaning forward, tense with excitement, his mouth open. "Yes,
that's just the way I felt about it," he murmured.

"But this was only a few paltry years ago, perhaps a hundred. It passes
from my view. I am led back, away from it--far back--the cries of those
you slaughtered echo but faintly--the scene changes--"

The professor paused. Bean had cowered in his chair, wincing under each
blow. He wiped his face and crumpled the moist handkerchief tightly in
one hand.

"Perhaps the name may come to me now," continued the professor. "But
your superior personality overwhelmed me at first; you are so
self-willed, so dominant, so ruthless. The name, the name!" He cried the
last words commandingly and snapped his fingers at the delinquent
control. "There! I seem to hear--"

"Never mind that name," broke in Bean hastily. "Let it go! I--I don't
want to know it. Go on back farther!"

Again the professor's look became trancelike.

"Ah! What a relief to be free from that blood-lust!" He breathed deeply
and his eyes rolled far up under their lids.

"What is this? A statesman, still crafty, still the lines of cunning
cruelty about the mouth. The city is Venice in the fourteenth century.
He is dressed in a richly bejewelled robe and toys with an inlaid
dagger. He is plotting the assassination of a Doge--"

"Please get still farther back, can't you?" pleaded Bean.

The seer struggled once more with his control.

"I next see you at the head of a Roman legion, going forth to battle.
You are a tyrant, ruling by fear alone, and with your own sword I see
you cut off the heads of--"

"Farther back," beseeched the sitter. "I--I've had enough of all that
battle and killing. I--I don't _like_ it. Go on back to the very first."

Patiently the adept redirected his forces.

"I see a poet. He sings his deathless lay by a roadside in ancient
Greece. He is an old man, feeble, blind--"

"Something else," broke in the persistent sitter, resolving not to pay
twenty dollars for having been a blind poet.

The professor glanced sharply at him. Perhaps his control did not relish
these interruptions. He seemed to suppress words of impatience and began
anew.

"Ah! Now I see your very first appearance on this planet. You were born
from another as yet unknown to our astronomers. You are now"-