is looking at it. This accursed gun has eaten up the little you had, and
some of my savings besides, although I have confidence that you will, at
least, pay me the interest due on that. It grieves me to tell you so, M.
de Comte, but all inventors are more or less crack-brained, and end in
the hospital. For the love of God, leave guns as they are, and invent
nothing more, or you will go overboard, and there will be no one to fish
you out."

Abel Larinski paused at this place. He put his letter down on the table,
and, turning round in his arm-chair, with a savage air, his eye fixed
on a distant corner of the room, he fell to thus soliloquizing in a
sepulchral voice:

"Do you hear, idiot? This old knave is right. Accursed be the day when
the genius of invention thrilled your sublime brain! A grand discovery
you have made, forsooth! What have I gained from it? Grand illusions,
grand discomfitures! What hath it availed me that I passed whole nights
discussing with you breech-loaders, screw-plates, tumbrels, sockets,
bridges, ovoid balls, and spring-locks? What fruits have I gained from
these refreshing conversations? You foresaw everything, my great man,
except that one little thing which great men so often fail to see, that
mysterious something, I know not what, which makes success. When you
spoke to me, in your slow, monotonous tones, when you fixed upon me your
melancholy gaze, I should have been able to read in your eyes that you
were only a fool. The devil take thee and thy gun, thy gun and thee;
hollow head, head full of chimeras, true Pole, true Larinski!"

To whom was Count Abel speaking? To a phantom? To his double? He alone
knew. When he had uttered the last words, he resumed the perusal of his
letter, which ended thus: