to determine its presence by the nicest
tests, it was quite clear to me, from being able
so readily to perceive the smell, that Mr. Volt
had died of an enormous overdose of opium. As
he had been a good chemist, it was hardly
reasonable to suppose that he could have taken
such a dose ignorantly, if in his senses. It remained,
therefore, either that Mr. Volt must
have committed suicide, sanely, or in a fit of
insanity, or that the opium must have been
intentionally administered to him by another
person. When I reflected upon Mark's anxiety
to prove that Mr. Volt was dead, and upon his
interest in his death, and when I considered
besides how singularly Mark was altered in
his ways and modes of thought, as well as
in his bodily appearance, for a moment I had
suspicions of him. His account, however,
was as follows: That, under the influence
of the vapour, Mr. Volt had taken by mistake
the same quantity of opium confection
that he had meant to take of the green paste,
while Mark, conscious of the mistake, yet being
himself under the influence of " hatchis " at
the time, was unable to recover himself soon
enough to prevent the error, or to use remedial
agents to save his friend's life. At the inquest
Mark nevertheless suppressed all mention of the
attempted experiment, and on his deposition
that the deceased had been in the habit of consuming
large quantities of narcotics, a verdict
was returned to the effect that Mr. Volt came to
his death through taking an overdose of opium in
a fit of temporary insanity. The general opinion
expressed by the rustic jury on dismissal, was
this: " They always know'd old Volt were certain
to pison hisself accidentally some day, and
now he had been and gone and done it sure
enough, and no mistake."

One afternoon, shortly after the funeral, to
while away the time while Mark went to visit
the same distant patient as before, I thought I
would go over the tower and look into some
of Mr. Volt's curious lumber. I obtained the
key from Mrs. Stedburn, and letting myself in
at the great heavy oak door, made my way to
the laboratory. Nothing seemed to have been
disturbed since Mr. Volt's decease. The place
was in its wonted litter. Books, manuscripts,
diagrams, instruments, bottles, retorts, crucibles,
were lying about as of yore. Taking
down a large manuscript tome from one of
the shelves, and finding it to consist of some
of Mr. Volt's dream-travels in Northern Asia, I
blew off the dust, and having banged the covers
together to beat out some of the pungent mildew
from inside, began reading. I had finished
the first chapter, when I heard my name called
in a tone of entreaty.

"Tom!"

I looked round, but could see no one. Presently
the call was repeated still more plaintively.

"Tom!"

There was no mistake about it, and it was
Mark Stedburn's voice.

"Tom, I say!"

The voice seemed to come from the other
side of the laboratory. I concluded that Mark
was in the grounds calling from outside one of
the windows.

"Where are you?" I halloed, going over to
a window to look out.

"Here," said the voice, faintly, apparently
from within the room. It seemed to come from
one of the shelves close by me, but high up. I
took the light ladder that belonged to the
laboratory, and began to examine these shelves
one after another: determined to see into this
delusion, for I thought it nothing else. There
were, on the shelves, books and bottles and
papers—papers and bottles and books—in endless
numbers, and all covered with dust. As I
ran my eye along them, I observed one very
small phial, less dusty than the rest, with a
label on it in small characters, apparently written
more recently than the labels on the other
bottles, for the ink on this one was not discoloured
by time as they were. I read thus:

MARK STEDBURN.
Bottled, Feb. 4, 1857.

The date was that of Mr. Volt's death. I was
about to take the phial into my hands to
examine it more closely, when a voice, that
appeared to come from the inside of the bottle,
said:

"Take me down very gently. Don't shake
me, Tom, whatever you do. This is I! " It
was Mark Stedburn's voice.

"You?"

"Yes, this is the pure Essence of Mind, which
that rascal, old Volt, has distilled out of my body
in a volatile spirit. Fool that I was to let him
try, but I never believed he could do it. This
is I, Tom—in a fluid state!"

I lifted him down carefully and placed
him before me on the laboratory table. The
bottle contained a thin colourless liquid, which
I judged to be very subtle and highly rectified,
because its surface was perfectly level,
and not concave in the slightest degree—as
would be the case with the strongest known
spirit. In so confined an area, it would rise
slightly at the sides of the glass, from attraction.
This did not.

I took out the cork to try how he would
smell.

"Don't, Tom, don't; it's so cold," he cried,
piteously, " cork me, there's a dear friend, cork
me quickly, or I shall evaporate, goodness
knows where."

"Mark," I said severely, having complied
with his request, " you are an impostor. You
are a phantasm of the brain, or of the stomach.
You either represent the ill effects of that bit
of ' hatchis' I was foolish enough to take two
months ago, or you are the ill-digested dinner
I took to-day with you and your wife."

"I'm no impostor, Tom," he answered.
"I'm an unfortunate reality. I'm persistent
and coherent, and independent of your will.
And I've been a most unfortunate reality without
the ghost of an external idea ever since
Volt served me this scurvy trick. You didn't
dine with me to-day, Tom. I don't appreciate