So, swallowing a mouthful and a peg, I went into my laboratory to plan murder—­legalised murder—­on the biggest scale it ever has been planned.  I was on the track of a weapon which would make war not only an affair of a single campaign, but of a single half-hour.  It would not want an army to work it either.  Once let an individual, or two or three at most, in possession of my weapon-that-was-to-be, get within a mile or so of even the largest body of disciplined troops that ever yet a nation put into the field, and—­pouf!—­in about the time it takes you to say that they would be all dead men.  If weapons of precision, which may be relied upon to slay, are preservers of the peace—­and the man is a fool who says that they are not!—­then I was within reach of the finest preserver of the peace imagination ever yet conceived.

What a sublime thought to think that in the hollow of your own hand lies the life and death of nations,—­and it was almost in mine.

I had in front of me some of the finest destructive agents you could wish to light upon—­carbon-monoxide, chlorine-trioxide, mercuric-oxide, conine, potassamide, potassium-carboxide, cyanogen—­when Edwards entered.  I was wearing a mask of my own invention, a thing that covered ears and head and everything, something like a diver’s helmet—­I was dealing with gases a sniff of which meant death; only a few days before, unmasked, I had been doing some fool’s trick with a couple of acids—­sulphuric and cyanide of potassium—­when, somehow, my hand slipped, and, before I knew it, minute portions of them combined.  By the mercy of Providence I fell backwards instead of forwards;—­sequel, about an hour afterwards Edwards found me on the floor, and it took the remainder of that day, and most of the doctors in town, to bring me back to life again.

Edwards announced his presence by touching me on the shoulder,—­ when I am wearing that mask it isn’t always easy to make me hear.

‘Someone wishes to see you, sir.’

‘Then tell someone that I don’t wish to see him.’

Well-trained servant, Edwards,—­he walked off with the message as decorously as you please.  And then I thought there was an end,—­ but there wasn’t.

I was regulating the valve of a cylinder in which I was fusing some oxides when, once more, someone touched me on the shoulder.  Without turning I took it for granted it was Edwards back again.

’I have only to give a tiny twist to this tap, my good fellow, and you will be in the land where the bogies bloom.  Why will you come where you’re not wanted?’ Then I looked round.  ’Who the devil are you?’

For it was not Edwards at all, but quite a different class of character.