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ack slabs of coal when he noticed that there was someone already in the room. This person came forward from his corner, where he had been engaged in softening the nether end of one candle in the flame of another so that it might hold fast in its sconce and not wobble, with his hand extended.
"Have I, sir," he asked, with the slightest of smiles, and an air of deference and courtesy, "the honor of beholding the author of the great treatise on the magnetical fluid?"
"You are too kind, sir," said Mainauduc, indicating to the waiter with but a flick of his eye that there was no objection taken to the stranger's presence and that the waiter might leave. "I am sensible of the complaint you pay me merely by having heard of my little pamphlet." And he bowed.
"Heard of it, Doctor?" cries the other, a smallish, slender man, clad in dark garments. He holds up his finger as if to command attention, and begins to speak.
"'The magnet attracts iron, iron is found everywhere, everything is therefore under the influence of magnetism. It is only a modification of the general principle, which establishes harmony or foments discord. It is the same agent that gives rise to sympathy, antipathy, and the passions.' Have I not the passage right, sir? My name is Blee, sir: James Blee."
"I am enchanted to meet you, Mr. Blee. I commend your memory. However," he seated himself at right angles to the fire "you will doubtless recall that the passage you quote is not mine. I was quoting from the Spaniard, Balthazar Graciano." He spread his long fingers to the blaze. "Are you a physician, sir?"
Mr. Blee perhaps did not hear the question.
"Then try my memory on this, Doctor," he said. "'There is a flux and reflux, not only in the sea, but in the atmosphere, which affects in a similar manner all organized bodies through the medium of a subtile and mobile fluid, which pervades the universe, and associates all things together in mutual intercourse and harmony.' Were you... dare we hope... is it that..