contributed to the general entertainment. Until tea-time that day
she had been unable to discover in what direction, if any, his
cleverness lay. He was neither a wit nor a croquet champion, a
hypnotic force nor a begetter of amateur theatricals. Neither did
his exterior suggest the sort of man in whom women are willing to
pardon a generous measure of mental deficiency. He had subsided
into mere Mr. Appin, and the Cornelius seemed a piece of
transparent baptismal bluff. And now he was claiming to have
launched on the world a discovery beside which the invention of
gunpowder, of the printing-press, and of steam locomotion were
inconsiderable trifles. Science had made bewildering strides in
many directions during recent decades, but this thing seemed to
belong to the domain of miracle rather than to scientific
achievement.

"And do you really ask us to believe," Sir Wilfrid was saying,
"that you have discovered a means for instructing animals in the
art of human speech, and that dear old Tobermory has proved your
first successful pupil?"

"It is a problem at which I have worked for the last seventeen
years," said Mr. Appin, " but only during the last eight or nine
months have I been rewarded with glimmerings of success. Of
course I have experimented with thousands of animals, but latterly
only with cats, those wonderful creatures which have assimilated
themselves so marvellously with our civilization while retaining
all their highly developed feral instincts. Here and there among
cats one comes across an outstanding superior intellect, just as
one does among the ruck of human beings, and when I made the
acquaintance of Tobermory a week ago I saw at once that I was in