“Why not,” snorted Bickley, “seeing that he deceives himself from one year’s end to the other?”

“I think,” said Bastin, “that this is an unholy business and that we are both deceived by the devil.  I will have no more to do with it,” and he departed to his cabin, probably to say some appropriate prayers.

After this the seances were given up but Jacobsen produced an instrument called a planchette and with difficulty persuaded Bickley to try it, which he did after many precautions.  The thing, a heart-shaped piece of wood mounted on wheels and with a pencil stuck at its narrow end, cantered about the sheet of paper on which it was placed, Bickley, whose hands rested upon it, staring at the roof of the cabin.  Then it began to scribble and after a while stopped still.

“Will the Doctor look?” said Jacobsen.  “Perhaps the spirits have told him something.”

“Oh! curse all this silly talk about spirits,” exclaimed Bickley, as he arranged his eyeglasses and held up the paper to the light, for it was after dinner.

He stared, then with an exclamation which I will not repeat, and a glance of savage suspicion at the poor Dane and the rest of us, threw it down and left the cabin.  I picked it up and next moment was screaming with laughter.  There on the top of the sheet was a rough but entirely recognizable portrait of Bickley with the accordion on his head, and underneath, written in a delicate, Italian female hand, absolutely different from his own, were these words taken from one of St. Paul’s Epistles—­“Oppositions of science falsely so called.”  Underneath them again in a scrawling, schoolboy fist, very like Bastin’s, was inscribed, “Tell us how this is done, you silly doctor, who think yourself so clever.”

“It seems that the devil really can quote Scripture,” was Bastin’s only comment, while Jacobsen stared before him and smiled.

Bickley never alluded to the matter, but for days afterwards I saw him experimenting with paper and chemicals, evidently trying to discover a form of invisible ink which would appear upon the application of the hand.  As he never said anything about it, I fear that he failed.

This planchette business had a somewhat curious ending.  A few nights later Jacobsen was working it and asked me to put a question.  To oblige him I inquired on what day we should reach Fremantle, the port of Perth.  It wrote an answer which, I may remark, subsequently proved to be quite correct.

“That is not a good question,” said Jacobsen, “since as a sailor I might guess the reply.  Try again, Mr. Arbuthnot.”

“Will anything remarkable happen on our voyage to the South Seas?” I inquired casually.

The planchette hesitated a while then wrote rapidly and stopped.  Jacobsen took up the paper and began to read the answer aloud—­“To A, B the D, and B the C, the most remarkable things will happen that have happened to men living in the world.”