of our ancient Father—­I half expected it was coming, had come, then.  It was as if the old, good-easy, meek-eyed man of science, dying, had left his effectual curse on all the world, and had thereby converted civilisation into one omnivorous grave, one universal charnel-house.  I spent several days in reading out to Zaleski accounts of particular deaths as they had occurred.  He seemed never to tire of listening, lying back for the most part on the silver-cushioned couch, and wearing an inscrutable mask.  Sometimes he rose and paced the carpet with noiseless foot-fall, his steps increasing to the swaying, uneven velocity of an animal in confinement as a passage here or there attracted him, and then subsiding into their slow regularity again.  At any interruption in the reading, he would instantly turn to me with a certain impatience, and implore me to proceed; and when our stock of matter failed, he broke out into actual anger that I had not brought more with me.  Henceforth the negro, Ham, using my trap, daily took a double journey—­one before sunrise, and one at dusk—­to the nearest townlet, from which he would return loaded with newspapers.  With unimaginable eagerness did both Zaleski and I seize, morning after morning, and evening after evening, on these budgets, to gloat for long hours over the ever-lengthening tale of death.  As for him, sleep forsook him.  He was a man of small reasonableness, scorning the limitations of human capacity; his palate brooked no meat when his brain was headlong in the chase; even the mild narcotics which were now his food and drink seemed to lose something of their power to mollify, to curb him.  Often rising from slumber in what I took to be the dead of night—­though of day or night there could be small certainty in that dim dwelling—­I would peep into the domed chamber, and see him there under the livid-green light of the censer, the leaden smoke issuing from his lips, his eyes fixed unweariedly on a square piece of ebony which rested on the coffin of the mummy near him.  On this ebony he had pasted side by side several woodcuts—­snipped from the newspapers—­of the figures traced on the pieces of papyrus found in the mouths of the dead.  I could see, as time passed, that he was concentrating all his powers on these figures; for the details of the deaths themselves were all of a dreary sameness, offering few salient points for investigation.  In those cases where the suicide had left behind him clear evidence of the means by which he had committed the act, there was nothing to investigate; the others—­rich and poor alike, peer and peasant—­trooped out by thousands on the far journey, without leaving the faintest footprint to mark the road by which they had gone.

This was perhaps the reason that, after a time, Zaleski discarded the newspapers, leaving their perusal to me, and turned his attention exclusively to the ebon tablet.  Knowing as I full well did the daring and success of his past spiritual adventures,—­the subtlety, the imagination, the imperial grip of his intellect,—­I did not at all doubt that his choice was wise, and would in the end be justified.  These woodcuts—­now so notorious—­were all exactly similar in design, though minutely differing here and there in drawing.  The following is a facsimile of one of them taken by me at random: