be one of the company.  But the member of our circle whom the reader will hereafter know as Number Seven, began stirring his tea in a nervous sort of way, and I knew that he was getting ready to say something about the case.  An ingenious man he is, with a brain like a tinder-box, its contents catching at any spark that is flying about.  I always like to hear what he says when his tinder brain has a spark fall into it.  It does not follow that because he is often wrong he may not sometimes be right, for he is no fool.  He treated my narrative very seriously.

The reader need not be startled at the new terms he introduces.  Indeed, I am not quite sure that some thinking people will not adopt his view of the matter, which seems to have a degree of plausibility as he states and illustrates it.

“The impulse which led you to tell that story passed directly from the letter, which came charged from the cells of the cerebral battery of your correspondent.  The distance at which the action took place [the letter was left on a shelf twenty-four feet from the place where I was sitting] shows this charge to have been of notable intensity.

“Brain action through space without material symbolism, such as speech, expression, etc., is analogous to electrical induction.  Charge the prime conductor of an electrical machine, and a gold-leaf electrometer, far off from it, will at once be disturbed.  Electricity, as we all know, can be stored and transported as if it were a measurable fluid.

“Your incident is a typical example of cerebral induction from a source containing stored cerebricity.  I use this word, not to be found in my dictionaries, as expressing the brain-cell power corresponding to electricity.  Think how long it was before we had attained any real conception of the laws that govern the wonderful agent, which now works in harness with the other trained and subdued forces!  It is natural that cerebricity should be the last of the unweighable agencies to be understood.  The human eye had seen heaven and earth and all that in them is before it saw itself as our instruments enable us to see it.  This fact of yours, which seems so strange to you, belongs to a great series of similar facts familiarly known now to many persons, and before long to be recognized as generally as those relating to the electric telegraph and the slaving `dynamo.’

“What! you cannot conceive of a charge of cerebricity fastening itself on a letter-sheet and clinging to it for weeks, while it was shuffling about in mail-bags, rolling over the ocean, and shaken up in railroad cars?  And yet the odor of a grain of musk will hang round a note or a dress for a lifetime.  Do you not remember what Professor Silliman says, in that pleasant journal of his, about the little ebony cabinet which Mary, Queen of Scots, brought with her from France,—­how ’its drawers still exhale the sweetest perfumes’?  If they could hold their sweetness for more than two hundred years, why should not a written page retain for a week or a month the equally mysterious effluence poured over it from the thinking marrow, and diffuse its vibrations to another excitable nervous centre?”