latched the window shut. After that I went to bed. I had had enough to set me thinking and was in no mood for sport or badinage. I left them sitting at the table and joking about what I had said.
For three nights nothing happened. Then, on Wednesday, Catchings got home first. It was about half-past 3 o'clock when he finished his supper and went into the parlor to smoke. I came at 4 and found him standing, white-faced and excited, in the hall, with every room in the house dark.
"I can't keep 'em lighted," he whispered, pointing to a gas jet. "Something turns them out."
"Oho!" said I. "Have you had a pipe dream? Where did you get the dope?"
"As God made me," he answered, "it's the truth."
As he said it the door between the kitchen and the dining-room smashed against its jamb with a crash that sent a shiver through the whole house and brought a man from the flat overhead out into the hall, demanding to know what was the matter.
Well, Catchings was satisfied, but Hopkins still laughed, and told long tales of things he had read of sendings and magic in the East.
"We have to do with neither sendings nor magic," replied Catchings. "Life is too short to be wasted in investigating such phenomena. I prefer to let others hold up the hands of science and go myself where such things are not."
"Don't get nervous, old man," said Hopkins. "Stay at least until it has given me a chance."
There was a week of quiet. Every night Hopkins hurried through his work to be the first one home, but it was not until last Thursday a week ago that he got his wish.
Catchings and I got home together, just before 4 o'clock. Hopkins was in the bath-room. It was a position of vantage, he said, from which he could observe the operations on both sides of him. Something had been playing hockey in the hall with the blue Chinese porcelain umbrella-jar. The game had been going on, Hopkins declared, for fully a quarter of an hour when we interrupted it. The jar would
