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On the following evening, Mr. Middleton and his bottle sat among a circle of some thirty persons who were gathered in the gloomy, lofty-ceiled parlor of Mr. Smitz. Before forming the circle, Mr. Smitz had addressed the company in a few well-chosen words, saying that a like purpose had brought all there that night, that as votaries of science and devotees of truth and persons of culture and refinement, mutual acquaintance could not but be pleasant as well as helpful, enabling those who sat together while witnessing the astounding and edifying phenomena they were soon to behold, to discuss these phenomena with reciprocal benefit–in view of all this, he hoped everybody would consider themselves introduced to everybody else.

Mr. Middleton, quickly inspecting the assemblage, whom he doubtless with great injustice denominated a crowd of sober dubs and solemn stiffs, so maneuvered that when all had drawn their chairs into a circle, a man deaf in the right ear sat at his left, while at his right sat a tall young lady, who though slightly pale was of an interesting appearance, notwithstanding. The somewhat tragic cast of her large and classic features was intensified by a pair of great mournful eyes and a wistful mouth, the whole framed in luxuriant masses of black hair, and altogether she was a girl whom one would give a second and third glance anywhere.

It developing in their very first exchange of remarks that she had never been present at a seance and that she could not look forward to what they were about to witness without great trepidation, Mr. Middleton offered to afford her every moral support and such physical protection as one mortal can assure another when facing the unknown powers of another world. At the extinguishment of the gas, he took her left hand, and finding it give a faint tremor, he took the other and was pleased to note that, so far as her hands gave evidence, thereupon her fears were quite allayed.

A breeze, chill and dank as the breath of a tomb, blew upon the company, and from the deep darkness into which they all stared with straining, unseeing eyes, came the solemn sound of Mr. Smitz, speaking hurriedly in somber tones in some sonorous unknown tongue, and low rustlings and whirrs and soft footfalls and faint rattlings that grew stronger, louder, each moment, swelling up into the stamp of a mailed heel and the clangor of arms as Mr. Smitz scratched a match and the light of a gas jet glanced upon helmet, corslet, shield, and greaves of a brazen-armored Greek warrior, standing in the middle of the circle, alive, in full corporeal presence!

“Leonidas, hero of Thermopylae!” shouted Mr. Smitz, and then continued at a conversational pitch, “if any of you wish to speak to him in his own language, you have full permission to do so.”

Those present lacking either the desire to accost the dread presence, or a command of the ancient Greek, after a bit Mr. Smitz turned off the gas and the noises that had heralded the visitant’s appearance began in reverse order, and at their cease, the gas being turned on again, there was the circle quite bare of any evidence that a Greek warrior in full panoply had but now stood there.

At these prodigies, the young lady trembled, but you could have applied all sorts of surgical devices for measuring nerve reaction to Mr. Middleton from the crown of his head to where his parallel feet held between them the copper bottle, and not have detected a tremor.

Mr. Smitz was reaching up to extinguish the gas once more, when a big, athletic blonde man, whose appearance and garb proclaimed him an Englishman, interrupted him.

“I am going to request you to materialize the spirit with whom I wish to converse, the next time. I have to catch a train at eleven and there are a number of things I would like to do before that. Yesterday, you promised me that you would materialize him first thing.”