them. This presented no difficulty. I found the rosettes that moved the
catches and had the panel out in a twinkling. The cupboard was five feet
high by four broad and had a well in the bottom covered by a lid, which
I lifted and, to my amazement, found the cavity filled with revolvers,
automatic pistols, life-preservers, knuckle-dusters and other weapons,
each having a little label--bearing a number and a date--tied neatly on
it. I shut the lid down rather hastily; there was something rather
sinister in that collection of lethal appliances.

The volumes, seven in number, were on the top shelf, uniformly bound in
Russia leather and labeled, respectively, "Photographs,"
"Finger-prints," "Catalogue," and four volumes of "Museum Archives." I
was about to reach down the catalogue when my eye fell on the pile of
shallow boxes on the next shelf. I knew what they contained and recalled
uncomfortably the strange impression that their contents had made on me;
and yet a sort of fascination led me to take down the top one--labelled
"Series B 5"--and raise the lid. But if those dreadful dolls' heads had
struck me as uncanny when poor Challoner showed them to me, they now
seemed positively appalling. Small as they were--and they were not as
large as a woman's fist--they looked so life-like--or rather, so
death-like--that they suggested nothing so much as actual human heads
seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There were five in this box,
each in a separate compartment lined with black velvet and distinguished
by a black label with white lettering; excepting the central one, which
rested on scarlet velvet and had a red label inscribed in gold "13th
May, 1909."

I gazed at this tiny head in its scarlet setting with shuddering
fascination. It had a hideous little face; a broad, brutal face of the
Tartar type; and the mop of gray-brown hair, so unhuman in color, and