the professor’s room.  They hastened to his door; it was locked on the inside; all was still within.  No answer coming to their calls, the door was broken in.  They found their master lying calm and dead on his bed.  A window of the room was open, but there was nothing to show that any one had entered it.  Dr. Hofmeier was sent for, and was soon on the scene.  After examining the body, he failed to find anything to account for the sudden demise of his old friend and chief.  One observation, however, had the effect of causing him to tingle with horror.  On his entrance he had noticed, lying on the side of the bed, the piece of papyrus with which the professor had been toying in the earlier part of the day, and had removed it.  But, as he was on the point of leaving the room, he happened to approach the corpse once more, and bending over it, noticed that the lips and teeth were slightly parted.  Drawing open the now stiffened jaws, he found—­to his amazement, to his stupefaction—­that, neatly folded beneath the dead tongue, lay just such another piece of papyrus as that which he had removed from the bed.  He drew it out—­it was clammy.  He put it to his nose,—­it exhaled the fragrance of honey.  He opened it,—­it was covered by figures.  He compared them with the figures on the other slip,—­they were just so similar as two draughtsmen hastily copying from a common model would make them.  The doctor was unnerved:  he hurried homeward, and immediately submitted the honey on the papyrus to a rigorous chemical analysis:  he suspected poison—­a subtle poison—­as the means of a suicide, grotesquely, insanely accomplished.  He found the fluid to be perfectly innocuous,—­pure honey, and nothing more.

The next day Germany thrilled with the news that Professor Schleschinger had destroyed himself.  For suicide, however, some of the papers substituted murder, though of neither was there an atom of actual proof.  On the day following, three persons died by their own hands in Berlin, of whom two were young members of the medical profession; on the day following that, the number rose to nineteen, Hamburg, Dresden, and Aachen joining in the frenzied death-dance; within three weeks from the night on which Professor Schleschinger met his unaccountable end, eight thousand persons in Germany, France, and Great Britain, died in that startlingly sudden and secret manner which we call ‘tragic’, many of them obviously by their own hands, many, in what seemed the servility of a fatal imitativeness, with figured, honey-smeared slips of papyrus beneath their tongues.  Even now—­now, after years—­I thrill intensely to recall the dread remembrance; but to live through it, to breathe daily the mawkish, miasmatic atmosphere, all vapid with the suffocating death—­ah, it was terror too deep, nausea too foul, for mortal bearing.  Novalis has somewhere hinted at the possibility (or the desirability) of a simultaneous suicide and voluntary return by the whole human family into the sweet bosom