The day was dismal and damp, foreboding a rainy spell. There were scarcely any people on the streets and at dusk, when the Montauk express stopped at the station of B----, there were only a few passengers to alight. One of them was a young woman attired in black, with a thick veil of similar hue drawn over her face. She looked furtively up and down the platform with painful anxiety, and espying an automobile a few rods below the station, walked toward it hesitatingly, at the same time pulling from her wrist-bag a crimson handkerchief. The chauffeur on the machine seemed to understand the meaning of the signal, for at once jumping down he advanced to meet the stranger. After several words were exchanged in subdued tones, he escorted the veiled lady to the vehicle and in a few minutes they were speeding down the road toward the Hindoo doctor's sanitarium. The woman, of course, was Margaret MacDonald and the chauffeur none other than the Levantine Jew, Esau, the Doctor's discreet servant. When they arrived at Ben Raaba's domicile it was almost pitch dark, and not a soul could be seen in the vicinity. At the ringing of the door-bell, Ben Raaba himself appeared and sedately welcomed Margaret, conducting her into the reception room. Shortly after, when Esau had withdrawn, they were sitting tête-à-tête at a table, perusing some mysterious documents to which at last, Margaret, taking a pen, subscribed her signature. The documents were nothing else than the legal contract, which Margaret had signed, offering herself a willing subject to undergo a mental and physical metamorphosis, and absolving Ben Raaba from any responsibility if the experiment should prove unsuccessful or fatal! After a fortnight of dietary preparation, Margaret was taken into the Laboratory of the Wizard and immediately hypnotized by him into a state of cataleptic coma. An awful sensation crept over one upon looking around about this den called the Laboratory. Glittering saws and scalpels were hung in rows on the walls; lances, beakers and retorts were scattered on the tables and on the floor, and a hundred and one other apparatus and bottles could be seen upon the shelves. A big cat-owl perched on a pedestal in one corner, and a black tom-cat with intense green eyes, prowling about the room, gave to the scene a cabalistic and weird aspect. Here among these uncanny surroundings Dr. Hyder Ben Raaba isolated and busied himself with continuous vigilance for many months in order to achieve an undertaking that seemed miraculous and impossible. Through the lapse of so many long and tedious months Dr. Hyder Ben Raaba had come to the completion of his assiduous labors,--labors which had almost exhausted his consummate skill in hypnotism, surgery and magic.