and was admitted to one of the front seats.  The room was tolerably lighted with gas; and a platform had been constructed for the lecturer and his subjects.  When the place was about half-filled, he came from another room alone —­ a little, thick-set, bull-necked man, with vulgar face and rusty black clothes; and, mounting the platform, commenced his lecture; if lecture it could be called, in which there seemed to be no order, and scarcely any sequence.  No attempt even at a theory, showed itself in the mass of what he called facts and scientific truths; and he perpeturated the most awful blunders in his English.  It will not be desired that I should give any further account of such a lecture.  The lecturer himself seemed to depend chiefly for his success, upon the manifestations of his art which he proceeded to bring forward.  He called his familiar by the name of Willi-am, and a stunted, pale-faced, dull-looking youth started up from somewhere, and scrambled upon the platform beside his master.  Upon this tutored slave a number of experiments was performed.  He was first cast into whatever abnormal condition is necessary for the operations of biology, and then compelled to make a fool of himself by exhibiting actions the most inconsistent with his real circumstances and necessities.  But, aware that all this was open to the most palpable objection of collusion, the operator next invited any of the company that pleased, to submit themselves to his influences.  After a pause of a few moments, a stout country fellow, florid and healthy, got up and slouched to the platform.  Certainly, whatever might be the nature of the influence that was brought to bear, its operative power could not, with the least probability, be attributed to an over-activity of imagination in either of the subjects submitted to its exercise.  In the latter, as well as in the former case, the operator was eminently successful; and the clown returned to his seat, looking remarkably foolish and conscious of disgrace —­ a sufficient voucher to most present, that in this case at least there had been no collusion.  Several others volunteered their negative services; but with no one of them did he succeed so well; and in one case the failure was evident.  The lecturer pretended to account for this, in making some confused and unintelligible remarks about the state of the weather, the thunder-storm, electricity, &c., of which things he evidently did not understand the best known laws.

“The blundering idiot!” growled, close to Hugh’s ear, a voice with a foreign accent.

He looked round sharply.

A tall, powerful, eminently handsome man, with a face as foreign as his tone and accent, sat beside him.

“I beg your pardon,” he said to Hugh; “I thought aloud.”

“I should like to know, if you wouldn’t mind telling me, what you detect of the blunderer in him.  I am quite ignorant of these matters.”

“I have had many opportunities of observing them; and I see at once that this man, though he has the natural power, is excessively ignorant of the whole subject.”