It was the optophone, and perhaps you may have seen, or rather heard it. It is an instrument for enabling a totally blind man to read a page of ordinary print. I myself had never heard of the thing, and am not sure that I give a technically correct description of it now, but, as I understand it, the page travels along the carriage in such a way that each letter in turn passes over a tiny ray of light that is directed through a morsel of selenium. The letter causes an interruption; a lower-case "l," for example, which is a straight line, making one kind of break, but an "i," which is the "l" with the dot cut off the top, a different one; and so with the other letters. The transmutation is of light into sound, and the official assured us that with a very little practice the ear learns to distinguish the minute variations in the telephonic receiver without difficulty. Remembering Hubbard's former (to me lunatic) conjectures that day when I had called on him at the Admiralty, I thought it an odd chance that I should come upon him examining such a thing as this optophone seemed to be; but our talk did not begin with that. Leaving the instrument, we turned away between glass showcases of fabrics and British glass and brilliant dyes and crystals and approached a window-bay that looked out on a gray courtyard. "Well, what are you doing here?" he said again cheerfully. "It's a long time since you looked me up." I told him that I went to all sorts of places in search of a little clowning for the _Circus_, and added that it was precisely the same distance from his place to mine as from mine to his. He laughed. "I should have thought this was out of your line," he replied. "Well, what's the news?" It was not likely that Hubbard had forgotten incidents so remarkable as those of that Lennox Street breakfast-party. Moreover, I could see he was sorry he had met me at this dead hour of the afternoon; he always talked better over lunch at Simpson's, with a Bronx or a Martini to start off with. Failing these, there was nothing for it but a cup of tea to wash down our chat, and as a matter of fact it was at a Slater's place in the Strand, with a rather good little band of violin, 'cello and piano that, a quarter of an hour later, we settled down. "Well, Esdaile's taken your friend Chummy away," I observed when our teapots had been brought. "Oh, he has, has he?" said Hubbard. "Queer business that, wasn't it? Have you made anything of it all yet?" "I can't say I have; but then I'm rather at a disadvantage in not knowing your friend. Tell me something about him." "Well--what, for example?" "As I know nothing you can't go far wrong," I replied.