"Ha!" said I, aloud. "You will not wink at me this time. Is there any other game you can play better than you play this?" The automaton was silent. I cannot say what impelled me to suggest it, but I drew a piece of paper and a pencil out of my pocket and said, "Can you write?" The door in the chest of the Sheik flew open then for a moment as if to expose his heart to me. Though I had put no coin into the machine, I saw the levers and gears start to move again, the door of that pulmonary cavity was closed and the brown fingers jerked their way forward. "Not only can write, but is anxious to do so," I remarked, as I extended the pencil and laid the paper on the chessboard. For a second or two I waited, as the hand of the mechanical creature wrote a few words: I remember that during those seconds I heard a clock somewhere striking six. I did not make any attempt to see beforehand what he had chosen to inscribe, for I assumed that it would be some empty answer to my bantering remarks. At last the pencil dropped upon the board and rolled under one of the cross-legged creature's red Turkish slippers, the whirr of the mechanism stopped abruptly, and I picked up the writing. Having read the scrawl once I believed myself out of my wits. I could not credit my eyes. I could not gather my reason. I was breathless, transfixed! I looked up at the face of the Sheik and found that, in place of the malicious wink with which he proclaimed himself a victor in a game of draughts, his glass eyes, with their whites in sharp contrast to his swarthy wax skin, were both wide open and set in a glare of such ferocity and malign hatred that they seemed to flash the fire of life and lighten the gloom of the corner with rays of evil. I laughed. I forced myself to laugh, but it was with no mirth, and then, hesitating for a moment and seized by the temptation to tear the automaton to shreds, to discover what was within its exterior, I turned, crunched the paper in my closed fist, and almost ran out through the lines of wax figures--the Garibaldis, the Jenny Linds, the Louis Napoleons, and the Von Moltkes--into the sunlight. No man can blame me for my excitement or even my terror, for the Sheik had written, "You are in danger! Withdraw before it is too late, and never see the old man or child of his again!" Had the time been the Middle Ages, or the place a strange quarter of the Orient, I might not have been so shocked at the knowledge which a tawdry machine, or the mountebank behind it, seemed to have of the affairs of persons against whom no charge of contact with the lower strata of life could be brought. But in our civilization, where nothing but the commonplace is to be expected, I was wholly unnerved.