He was silent, evidently contemplating the idea with vast pleasure. And as for me, at that moment my last doubt of Larry O'Keefe vanished, I saw that he did believe, really believed, in his banshees, his leprechauns and all the old dreams of the Gael--but only within the limits of Ireland. In one drawer of his mind was packed all his superstition, his mysticism, and what of weakness it might carry. But face him with any peril or problem and the drawer closed instantaneously leaving a mind that was utterly fearless, incredulous, and ingenious; swept clean of all cobwebs by as fine a skeptic broom as ever brushed a brain. "Some stuff!" Deepest admiration was in his voice. "If we'd only had it when the war was on--imagine half a dozen of us scooting over the enemy batteries and the gunners underneath all at once beginning to shake themselves to pieces! Wow!" His tone was rapturous. "It's easy enough to explain, Larry," I said. "The effect, that is--for what the green ray is made of I don't know, of course. But what it does, clearly, is stimulate atomic vibration to such a pitch that the cohesion between the particles of matter is broken and the body flies to bits--just as a fly-wheel does when its speed gets so great that the particles of which _it_ is made can't hold together." "Shake themselves to pieces is right, then!" he exclaimed. "Absolutely right," I nodded. "Everything in Nature vibrates. And all matter--whether man or beast or stone or metal or vegetable--is made up of vibrating molecules, which are made up of vibrating atoms which are made up of truly infinitely small particles of electricity called electrons, and electrons, the base of all matter, are themselves perhaps only a vibration of the mysterious ether. "If a magnifying glass of sufficient size and strength could be placed over us we could see ourselves as sieves--our space lattice, as it is called. And all that is necessary to break down the lattice, to shake us into nothingness, is some agent that will set our atoms vibrating at such a rate that at last they escape the unseen cords and fly off. "The green ray of Yolara is such an agent. It set up in the dwarf that incredibly rapid rhythm that you saw and--shook him not to atoms--but to electrons!" "They had a gun on the West Front--a seventy-five," said O'Keefe, "that broke the eardrums of everybody who fired it, no matter what protection they used. It looked like all the other seventy-fives--but there was something about its sound that did it. They had to recast it." "It's practically the same thing," I replied. "By some freak its vibratory qualities had that effect. The deep whistle of the sunken Lusitania would, for instance, make the Singer Building shake to its foundations; while the Olympic did not affect the Singer at all but made the Woolworth shiver all through. In each case they stimulated the atomic vibration of the particular building--"