Spinrobin swallowed the bait whole.  “Unworldly” put the match, and he flamed up.  He possessed, it seemed, the other necessary qualifications; for a thin tenor voice, not unmusical, was his, and also a smattering of Hebrew which he had picked up at Cambridge because he liked the fine, high-sounding names of deities and angels to be found in that language.  Courage and imagination he lumped in, so to speak, with the rest, and in the gilt-edged diary he affected he wrote:  “Have taken on Skale’s odd advertisement.  I like the man’s name.  The experience may prove an adventure.  While there’s change, there’s hope.”  For he was very fond of turning proverbs to his own use by altering them, and the said diary was packed with absurd misquotations of a similar kind.

II

A singular correspondence followed, in which the advertiser explained with reserve that he wanted an assistant to aid him in certain experiments in sound, that a particular pitch and quality of voice was necessary (which he could not decide until, of course, he had heard it), and that the successful applicant must have sufficient courage and imagination to follow a philosophical speculation “wheresoever it may lead,” and also be “so far indifferent to worldly success as to consider it of small account compared to spiritual knowledge—­especially if such knowledge appeared within reach and involved worldly sacrifices.”  He further added that a life of loneliness in the country would have to be faced, and that the man who suited him and worked faithfully should find compensation by inheriting his own “rather considerable property when the time came.”  For the rest he asked no references and gave none.  In a question of spiritual values references were mere foolishness.  Each must judge intuitively for himself.

Spinrobin, as has been said, bit.  The letters, written in a fine scholarly handwriting, excited his interest extraordinarily.  He imagined some dreamer-priest possessed by a singular hobby, searching for things of the spirit by those devious ways he had heard about from time to time, a little mad probably into the bargain.  The name Skale sounded to him big, yet he somehow pictured to himself an ascetic-faced man of small stature pursuing in solitude some impossible ideal.  It all attracted him hugely with its promise of out-of-the-way adventure.  In his own phrase it “might lead to something,” and the hints about “experiments in sound” set chords trembling in him that had not vibrated since the days of his boyhood’s belief in names and the significance of names.  The salary, besides, was good.  He was accordingly thrilled and delighted to receive in reply to his last letter a telegram which read:  “Engage you month’s trial both sides.  Take single ticket.  Skale.”