Today's Stichomancy for Rebecca Gayheart

bushes exhaled warm and honied odours. There were trunks of trees smeared with cinnabar, which resembled columns covered with blood. In the centre were twelve pedestals, each supporting a great glass ball, and these hollow globes were indistinctly filled with reddish lights, like enormous and still palpitating eyeballs. The soldiers lighted themselves with torches as they stumbled on the slope of the deeply laboured soil.

But they perceived a little lake divided into several basins by walls of blue stones. So limpid was the wave that the flames of the torches quivered in it at the very bottom, on a bed of white pebbles and golden dust. It began to bubble, luminous spangles glided past, and

Salammbo

which is found attached to the window-pane by a coating of white mold. I have developed the spores of this mold and have produced a giant species. Observe the interesting effect of the strong light upon my orange and blue amanita fungus!"

Hard beside me I heard Nayland Smith groan, Weymouth had become suddenly silent. For my own part, I could have shrieked in pure horror. FOR I KNEW WHAT WAS COMING. I realized in one agonized instant the significance of the dim lantern, of the careful progress through the subterranean fungi grove, of the care with which Fu-Manchu and his servant had avoided touching any of the growths. I knew, now, that Dr. Fu-Manchu was the greatest fungologist

The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu

had been a time of jolly companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had proved herself the ideal comrade. . . . They had shouted _Love_ _in_ _the_ _Valley_ to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn' (and so on, and so on--I'll skip the descriptions). . . . 'But in London, after the boy's birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable mother; but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise. . . .' (In short she began to give tea-parties.) . . . 'Coming

and uttered some words which Thorpe, though he recognized them as English in intent, failed to follow. The voice was that of an elderly man, and at a second glance there were plenty of proofs that he might have been older than the Marquis, out there in Persia, forty years ago. But Thorpe did not like old men who dyed their hair, and he offered his visitors chairs, drawn up from the table toward his desk, with a certain reserve of manner. Seating himself in the revolving chair at the desk itself, he put the tips of his fingers together, and looked this gentleman with the Continental name and experience

The Market-Place