Being his senior by a good many years, I thought it my duty to point out the hazardous nature of these excursions into the unknown. I was fascinated by his story, of course, together with Hooper’s singularly definite corroboration of its chief features, yet I feared lest such playing with nervous excitability might result in paralysis or mental trouble. But Karl’s cheery laugh reassured me. “I have taken a very precise set of notes of a lecture on Seismic Waves this morning,” he said, “and at this very moment I could break that poker across my knee. There’s little wrong with my brains, and still less with my muscles, I can assure you.” He leaned forward, picked up the poker, and examined it critically. It was an old-fashioned, heavy implement, with its point sharpened by years of forgetfulness, which, in pokerdom, takes the form of slow consumption in sulky fires. “Now that I come to examine it, I don’t think I can break it. Being honest wrought iron, it will bend into a hoop. But I’ll polarize it, by way of a change.” He pulled up his coat sleeves, and turned back the cuffs of his shirt so as to bare his wrists. Then holding the poker point downwards on the hearthrug, he began to stroke it softly with the tips of his fingers and thumbs. His hands were white, long-fingered, and finely molded, his wrists square and hard. Looking at him, watching the smile playing on his eager face, and the athletic poise of his body as he kept the poker from falling, I was struck by his physical resemblance to the Vatican Discobolus, with its wonderful combination of repose at the completion of the backward movement of the thrower, and of action at the commencement of the powerful forward cast. But such thoughts were dispelled by the uncanny antics of the poker. It was broad daylight, and any sleight-of-hand performance was out of the question in every sense. Yet both Hooper and I myself saw Karl withdraw his support from the poker, continuing the stroking movement in the air, and gradually widening the distance between his hands. And the poker did not fall! It stood there immovable, as though its point were stuck in the floor through the rug. At first I candidly admit that I was certain Grier had found a hole in the carpet which coincided with a crack in the flooring. But when he inclined the imaginary axis of his hands, thus changing the direction of the magnetic current that flowed between them, the poker adjusted its poise to the new line of force. It described circles, leaned over at impossible angles, lifted itself fully a foot in the air, and twice traced in space the figure of a Maltese cross. I lay stress on this simple yet peculiar manifestation of Karl’s powers, because it was the first instance of them which had actually come under my personal notice. Certainly I was amazed, and even Hooper, notwithstanding the marvels he had witnessed, expressed his surprise at the new feature of his friend’s astounding qualities.