black eyes, set close together, so that he resembled a gnome of amazing
brain capacity and prodigious power of concentration, sat bent over a
writing desk with a huge sheet of cardboard before him, on which he was
swiftly drawing geometrical and trigonometrical figures. Compasses,
T-squares, rulers, protractors, and ellipsographs obeyed the touch of
his fingers as if inspired with life.

The room around him was a jungle of terrestrial and celestial globes,
chemists' retorts, tubes, pipes, and all the indescribable apparatus
that modern science has invented, and which, to the uninitiated, seems
as incomprehensible as the ancient paraphernalia of alchemists and
astrologers. The walls were lined with book shelves, and adorned along
the upper portions with the most extraordinary photographs and drawings.
Even the ceiling was covered with charts, some representing the sky,
while many others were geological and topographical pictures of the face
of the earth.

Beside the drawing-board lay a pad of paper, and occasionally the little
man nervously turned to this, and, grasping a long pencil, made
elaborate calculations, covering the paper with a sprinkling of
mathematical symbols that looked like magnified animalcula. While he
worked, under a high light from a single window placed well up near the
ceiling, his forehead contracted into a hundred wrinkles, his cheeks
became feverous, his piercing eyes glowed with inner fire, and drops of
perspiration ran down in front of his ears. One would have thought that
he was laboring to save his very soul and had but a few seconds of
respite left.

Presently he threw down the pencil, and with astonishing agility let
himself rapidly, but carefully, off the stool on which he had been