"Psychrobes," said the Idiot. "You know what I mean--a clairvoyant, a medium, a sike--somebody in the spiritual inter-State commerce business, who knows his or her job right down to the ground and back again." "H'm! Why--yes, I know one or two mediums," said the Doctor. "Strictly up-to-date and reliable?" said the Idiot. "Ready to trot in double harness?" "Oh, as to their reliability as mediums I can't testify," said the Doctor. "You never can tell about those people, but I will say that in all respects other than their psychic indulgences I have always found those I know wholly reliable." "You mean they wouldn't take a watch off a bureau when the owner wasn't looking, or beat a suffering corporation out of a nickel if they had a chance?" said the Idiot. "That's it," said the Doctor. "But, as I say, you never can tell. A man may be the soul of honor in respect to paying his board bill, and absolutely truthful in statements of the everyday facts of life, and yet when he goes off, er--when he goes off--" "Psychling," suggested the Idiot. "Bully good title for a story that--'Psychling with a Psychrobe'--eh? What?" "Fair," said the Doctor. "But what I was going to say was that when he goes off psychling, as you put it, he may, or may not, be quite so reliable. So if I were to indorse any one of my several clairvoyant patients for you, it would have to be as patients, and not as psychlists." "That's all right," said the Idiot. "That's all I really want. If I can be sure that a medium is a person of correct habits in all other respects, I'll take my chances on his reliability as a transient." "As a transient?" repeated the Bibliomaniac. "Yes," said the Idiot. "A person in a state of trance." "What has awakened this sudden interest of yours in things psychic?" asked the Doctor. "Are you afraid that your position as a dispenser of pure idiocy is threatened by the recorded utterances of great thinkers now passed into the shadowy vales, as presented to us by the mediums?" "Not at all," said the Idiot. "Fact is, I do not consider their utterances as idiotic. Take that recent report of the lady who got into communication with the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte, and couldn't get anything out of him but a regretful allusion to Panama hats and pink pajamas, for instance. Everybody thought it was very foolish, but I didn't. To me it was merely a sad intimation of the particular kind of climate the great Corsican had got for his in the hereafter. He needed his summer clothes, and couldn't for the moment think of anything else. I should have been vastly more surprised if he had called for a pair of ear-tabs and a fur overcoat." "And do you really believe, also for instance," put in the Bibliomaniac scornfully, "that with so many big questions before the public to-day Thomas Jefferson would get off such drivel as has been attributed to him by these people, having a chance to send a real message to his countrymen?"