The talk of the half-dozen men on the veranda of the Singapore club--a couple of merchants, a planter in town on business, an officer of an Indian regiment, a globe-trotting professor from an American university, and a sea-captain--had drifted desultorily from the specific instance of the famous Indian rope-trick, resuscitated by a British magazine that lay upon the club-tables and contested sceptically by the Anglo-Indian officer, to the general topic of the alleged ability of the Asiatic to make people “see what isn’t there.” The American professor, whose specialty, as he confessed, was psychology, manifested a pertinacious interest in the subject. But his direct questions to these habitual dwellers in the Middle and Far East elicited only contemptuous negatives or vague second- and third-hand stories without evidential value. Merchants, planter, and officer alike had quite obviously none of them seen any tricks upon which the professor could safely base his rather rashly enunciated theory of special hypnotic powers possessed by the inscrutable races, whose surface energies are so profitably exploited by the white man. He turned at last to the sea-captain who had sat puffing at his cheroot in silence. “And you, Captain Williamson? You have voyaged about these seas for the best part of a generation--have you never been confronted by one of these inexplicable phenomena of which the travellers tell us?” There was just a little of Oliver Wendell Holmes pedantry about the professor--a touch of that Boston of the ’eighties in which he had been educated. Captain Williamson changed the duck-clad leg which crossed the other and smiled a little with his keen gray eyes. Caressing the neat pointed beard which accentuated the oval of his intelligent face, he replied thoughtfully: “Well, Professor--I have. Once. Personally, though I saw the affair with my own eyes, I don’t even now know what to make of it. Perhaps your hypnotic theory might explain it.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Will you not tell us the story?” entreated the professor. “It is so rare to receive trustworthy first-hand evidence of anything abnormal.” Captain Williamson glanced rather diffidently around upon his companions. “Fire away, cap’en!” exclaimed one of the merchants, slapping him amicably on the knee. “You’ve always got a good yarn!” “This happens to be a true one,” said the captain, with a smile of tolerance, “but, of course, you are under no compulsion to believe it!” “Drinks all round on the one who doesn’t!” decreed the planter. “Go ahead! Don’t ask us to believe rubber is going to boom again, that’s all. Short of that, we’ll believe anything.”