All this took place about the years 1858-9, and was continued until the Institute finally closed its doors, principally caused by the fall of the stone staircase, and sold all off to a new limited liability company when Mr. Pepper was giving courses of lectures at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham. Again, for the last time, and during the absence of Professor Pepper in Australia, where he stopped ten years, viz., from 1879 to 1889, a sale of the plant and machinery, &c., of the Royal Polytechnic took place, on the 28th of February and three following days in 1882. Mr. George Buckland and his friends tried to secure the lease by purchase; but, not completing the purchase in time, it was bought by Quintin Hogg, Esq., who has greatly added to the size of the building, which is chiefly devoted to classes, at least fifty in number, teaching all kinds of useful knowledge, with a large day school for boys, who are numbered by hundreds, and are well and most efficiently taught by competent masters. The Laboratory has also been enlarged, and is now under the able guidance of Mr. Ward, the teacher of Chemistry and Physics. But to return to the Christmas of 1862, ever memorable in the annals of the Institute because Mr. Pepper brought out the illusion in quite a different manner from that contemplated by Mr. Dircks, and so improved and simplified the ghost that it could be shown in any lecture hall or theatre, if sufficiently large to contain the necessary apparatus. The following is a narrative from the lips of the inventor of the ghost improvement:—“Just before Christmas Day in 1862, I invited a number of literary and scientific friends, and my always kind supporters, the members of the press, to a private view of the new illusion to be introduced into Bulwer’s romantic and dramatic literary creation, called ‘A Strange Story.’ The effect of the first appearance of the apparition on my illustrious audience was startling in the extreme, and far beyond anything I could have hoped for and expected, so much so that, although I had previously settled to explain the whole _modus operandi_ on that evening, I deferred doing so, and went the next day to Messrs. Carpmael, the patent agents, and took out a provisional patent for the ghost illusion, in the names, at my request, of Dircks and Pepper. The day after the first evening I showed the ghost, Mr. Dircks came down to the Polytechnic, and after saying how much pleased he was with the manner in which I had introduced the illusion, ended by handing me a letter, in which he spoke highly of my work in respect of the ghost, and gave me spontaneously whatever profits might accrue from the invention. Moreover, he went to Carpmael with me, and, being an old and experienced patent agent himself, assisted in drawing up the patent which is here copied, with my original drawing of the improved method of showing the ghost by the use of a ‘Double Stage,’ at the old Royal Polytechnic Institute.” [Illustration]