in the fourteenth century. Therefore there are two hundred years
between the manuscript and the document."

I admitted that this was a strictly logical conclusion.

"I am therefore led to imagine," continued my uncle, "that some
possessor of this book wrote these mysterious letters. But who was
that possessor? Is his name nowhere to be found in the manuscript?"

My uncle raised his spectacles, took up a strong lens, and carefully
examined the blank pages of the book. On the front of the second, the
title-page, he noticed a sort of stain which looked like an ink blot.
But in looking at it very closely he thought he could distinguish
some half-effaced letters. My uncle at once fastened upon this as the
centre of interest, and he laboured at that blot, until by the help
of his microscope he ended by making out the following Runic
characters which he read without difficulty.

"Arne Saknussemm!" he cried in triumph. "Why that is the name of
another Icelander, a savant of the sixteenth century, a celebrated
alchemist!"

I gazed at my uncle with satisfactory admiration.

"Those alchemists," he resumed, "Avicenna, Bacon, Lully, Paracelsus,
were the real and only savants of their time. They made discoveries
at which we are astonished. Has not this Saknussemm concealed under
his cryptogram some surprising invention? It is so; it must be so!"

The Professor's imagination took fire at this hypothesis.