meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile (so far as regards externals) which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings-imitating the D- - cipher very readily by

means of a seal formed of bread.

"The disturbance in the street had been occasioned by the frantic behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of women and children. It proved however, to have been without ball, and the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard. he had gone, D came from the window, whither I had followed him immediately upon securing the object in view. Soon afterward I bade him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man in my own pay.

of nerve.

When 10

"But what purpose had you," I asked, “in replacing 15 the letter by a fac-simile. Would it not have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly, and departed?" "D-,"replied Dupin, "is a desperate man, and a man His hôtel, too, is not without attendants devoted to his interest. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest, 20 I might never have left the ministerial presence alive. The good people of Paris might have heard of me no more. But I had an object apart from these considerations. You know my political prepossessions. In this matter I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For eighteen 25 months the minister has had her in his power. She has now him in hers-since, being unaware that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his exactions as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction. His downfall, too, will 30 not be more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I

have no sympathy-at least no pity-for him who descends. He is that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the precise character of his thoughts, when, being 5 defied by her whom the Prefect terms 'a certain personage, he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the card-rack."

"How? did you put anything particular in it?"

"Why, it did not seem altogether right to leave the 10 interior blank-that would have been insulting. Dat Vienna, once did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, that I should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought 15 it a pity not to give him a clue. He is well acquainted with my MS.; and I just copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words

666 -Un dessein si funeste,

S'il n'est digne d'Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.'

They are to be found in Crébillon's Atree."

SUGGESTIONS: From what point of view is The Purloined Letter told? What is gained by this point of view? Cf. Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

How long a period of time is covered by the whole sequence of events connected with the story? How long a time is covered by the actual story itself, i. e., the "action proper?" What general law for short story writing can we deduce from this? How effective is the actual beginning of The Purloined Letter? Compare this mode of starting a story with the modes employed in Fame's Little Day, and The Man Who Was, respectively.

After you have selected a plot for your own story, decide upon the number and type of characters to be introduced. Use a point of view similar to that in The Purloined Letter. Decide carefully upon the best point for the "action proper" to begin. Plan a solution of the mystery that shall be sufficiently ingenious to arouse your reader's interest and suspense.

ADAPTED SUBJECTS

From any one of the following plots write a "tale of ratiocination," with Dupin as the man who solves the mystery. (a) "While A. M. Jones and his wife, of Pittsburgh, were taking dinner last night at the Hotel Woodstock, No. 127 West Forty-third Street, where they are stopping, their big black touring car was stolen.

"At six-thirty this morning, Lieutenant Kauff of the West One Hundred and Twenty-sixth Street police station found an automobile at One Hundred and Twenty-sixth Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. Its cylinders were cold, so Lieutenant Kauff thought it had been abandoned.

"The car was in good shape and intact. Pinned to one of the rugs was an envelope addressed to Mrs. Jones, so Lieutenant Kauff communicated with her. He then hailed a milk-wagon, and the auto was towed to the station house, where Mrs. Jones later claimed it. The envelope contained a ten-dollar bill, with the words “Thank you, "written on a slip of paper. clue to the person or persons who thus borrowed the machine has yet been found.'

66

No

(b) "London, April 13.-At the Clerkenwell Sessions today Lord William Nevill was found guilty of the charge of swindling a pawnbroker and was sentenced to a year's imprisonment. Lord William Nevill is the fourth son of the Marquis of Abergavenny. He was sentenced to five years' penal servitude on February 15, 1898, for fraud in connection with a promissory note. The crime for which Lord William was sentenced to-day was stealing from a pawnbroker a box containing $2000 worth of jewelry, by exchanging it for a similar box, apparently containing the jewels. When this box was opened, it was found to contain two pieces of coal wrapped in tissue paper."

(c) "Laredo, Texas, May 2.-The Wells Fargo Express Company has reported to the authorities of Torreon, Mexico, a loss of $63,000 in Mexican currency, which they say was taken from a 'through' safe on their City of Mexico train. The money was consigned to one of the banks of Chihuahua.

"Two arrests have been made in Torreon, although it is not believed by the officials here that these men have the money. It appears that one of the agents of the company boarded the

express train at a station between the City of Mexico and Torreon, afterward leaving the train. It is said that he was the only man who was in the car who knew the combination of the safe. He has not yet been apprehended.”

5

DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT*

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

THAT very singular man, old Dr. Heidegger, once

invited four venerable friends to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, and a withered gentlewoman, whose name was the Widow Wycherly. They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was, that they were not long ago in their graves. Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had 10 been a prosperous merchant, but had lost his all by a frantic speculation, and was now little better than a mendicant. Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years, and his health and substance, in the pursuit of sinful pleasures, which had given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout, and divers other torments of soul and body. Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man of evil fame, or at least had been so, till time had buried him from the knowledge of the present generation, and made him obscure instead of infamous. As for the Widow 20 Wycherly, tradition tells us that she was a great beauty in her day; but, for a long while past, she had lived in deep seclusion, on account of certain scandalous stories, which had prejudiced the gentry of the town against her. It *From Twice Told Tales, vol. 1. By permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

15

is a circumstance worth mentioning, that each of these three old gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, were early lovers of the Widow Wycherly, and had once been on the point of cutting each others' throats for her sake. And, before proceeding 5 further, I will merely hint, that Dr. Heidegger and all his four guests were sometimes thought to be a little beside themselves; as is not unfrequently the case with old people, when worried either by present troubles or woful recollections.

"My dear old friends," said Dr. Heidegger, motioning them to be seated, "I am desirous of your assistance in one of those little experiments with which I amuse myself here in my study.

10

If all stories were true, Dr. Heidegger's study must 15 have been a very curious place. It was a dim, old-fashioned chamber festooned with cobwebs, and besprinkled with antique dust. Around the walls stood several oaken bookcases, the lower shelves of which were filled with rows of gigantic folios, and black-letter quartos, and the upper 20 with little parchment-covered duodecimos. Over the central bookcase was a bronze bust of Hippocrates, with which, according to some authorities, Dr. Heidegger was accustomed to hold consultations, in all difficult cases of his practice. In the obscurest corner of the room stood 25 a tall and narrow oaken closet, with its door ajar, within which doubtfully appeared a skeleton. Between two of the bookcases hung a looking-glass, presenting its high and dusty plate within a tarnished gilt frame. Among many wonderful stories related of this mirror, it was fabled that 30 the spirits of all the doctor's deceased patients dwelt within its verge, and would stare him in the face whenever he looked thitherward. The opposite side of the chamber was ornamented with the full-length portrait