"'I don't call it friendly to scare a man to death; I don't call it friendly to steal invisibly into a man's office and choke him nearly to suffocation. It seems to me you might use some other style of cologne to advantage when you go calling on your friends, and if I had cheeks through which my whole molar system was visible to the outside world, I'd grow whiskers.'" "My admiration for you has increased eighty-seven per cent.," put in Toppleton, "that is, it has if all you say you said to the spook is true." "I'd swear to it," returned the spirit, the tone of his voice showing the gratification he felt at Toppleton's words. "I talked up to him all the time, though I was quaking inwardly from the start. He noticed it too, for he said practically what you have just remarked. "'You command my highest admiration,' were his words. 'If you were as spunky as this all the time, you would not need my assistance, but you are not, and so I have come. _You must not compromise that case._' "Here the deadly green thing rose from the chair and approached me," continued the spirit, "and as he approached my terror increased, so it is no wonder that, when he got so near that I could feel his wretched soul-chilling breath upon my cheek, his luminous body towering above me as a giant towers over a dwarf, and repeated the words, '_you must not compromise that case_,' I should shrink back into a heap at the side of my desk, and reply, 'Certainly _not_.'" "'You have a splendid fighting chance,' he added, 'but it will be a bitter fight,--a fight, the winning of which will make you famous, but which you, by yourself, with all the law in Christendom on your side, could no more win than you could batter down the Tower of London with balls of putty.' "'Then,' said I, 'I _must_ compromise.' "'No,' returned my visitor, 'for I am here to win the case for you.' "'You will never be retained,' I retorted. 'You are a degree too foggy to be acceptable either to my client or to myself.' "'I do not ask to be retained; but you must provide me with the means to appear in court. _You must leave your body and let me put it on._'" "That must have been a staggerer," said Hopkins. "Were you fool enough to give it to him without getting a receipt?"