A few hours brought me again to the mighty metropolis, and I quickly set to work with my elaborate apparatus, but, alas! only to be the victim of another disappointment. Although I could obtain certain mental sounds (if I may so term them), and could, by the aid of my thought-reading power, understand that words were being thought by the brain-ether in the monarch’s cranium, yet, unfortunately, to fathom their meaning was beyond me. Pure Saxon was a language with which I was totally unacquainted! Here was another stupid mistake of mine, of precisely the same nature as the one I made in my first experiment. What could I do? Very little. I copied down, phonetically, a number of the words which the monarch was _thinking_, and showed them to a professor of Anglo-Saxon, but all he could do was to translate some of them into modern English, so giving a series of words without any sequence or connection whatever. Angry with myself, and angry with the skull simply for being Saxon, and therefore not understandable, I took it in my hand, and, in my disappointment and rage, should doubtless have shattered it into fragments against the wall, but for the sudden ringing of my door bell, warning me of the arrival of a gentleman with whom I had an appointment. When the interview was over my anger had ceased also, and that afternoon, with the skull in a bag, I took train for X----, and repaired to my stack of chairs in the cathedral. I hid myself again, like a felon, till the doors were closed, then restoring the skull uninjured to its resting-place, crept back to my hassock seat, and awaited the dawning. I fell asleep, and I suppose snored, for, to my astonishment, I was awakened next morning by the verger, who, not believing my cock-and-bull story of having been shut in the cathedral while absorbed in the contemplation of the ancient structure and its interesting relics, haled me before a magistrate. It was with difficulty I proved my identity, and doing so cost me all the loose cash I had about me in telegraphing to my friends, before the worthy magistrate would release me, although I had been twice searched to see if anything of value was secreted about my person. Oh, science! what miseries thou hast for ages brought upon thy noblest sons! What sorrows; what disappointments; what troubles and trials, and alas, what terms of vile durance! I, being one of thy sons, have shared all these evils, though perhaps in a minor degree! My failures, however, were not unmitigated: I had established the fact that brain-ether and brain-thought were present in skulls, whatever their nationality, and to whatever period they might belong; my failures were attributable principally to my lack of linguistic knowledge, a lack that might easily be remedied.