Further particulars would be sent to any one satisfying the company that his request for the same was not prompted by idle curiosity, but by a desire to aid science in replacing the lost instrument. Then came the greatest surprise of all; for, signed at the bottom of this interesting statement, as the man representing the company, was the name of Randolph R. Churchill, Patent Office, Washington, D. C. Now Ranny Churchill and I had been roommates at college, and I had had many a pleasant visit in his comfortable home on Fourteenth Street. He had graduated from a technical school, taken a course in patent law, and soon after secured a position as one of the governmental inspectors of patents in Washington. My annual vacation was to begin the next week, so I planned a brief trip to Washington to see the wonderful invention which no one had apparently been able to duplicate. I did not write to Churchill, but dropped in on him unexpectedly Saturday night, September 1. I had seen him two years before down on the Cape; and I could scarcely believe that the tired, careworn man who greeted me on my arrival at the Fourteenth Street house was the same merry, light-hearted Randolph Churchill I had hunted and fished with only a couple of summers ago. He seemed like a man living in constant expectation of something terrible about to happen, and, even before our first greetings were over, I noticed that he paused two or three times and listened intently. “I think I can guess to what I owe this visit,” he said as he went up-stairs with me to my room, “and I would to God I thought you would be able to accomplish what has so far proved impossible.” I told him that it was owing to his advertisement that my present trip had been undertaken, and begged him to tell me more about the wonderful invention. “Wait till after dinner,” he said, “for it is a long story. We will go to my room, and I will tell you then a tale as strange as it is true.” That dinner was the most dismal affair I ever attended. Churchill sat like a man in a trance, completely absorbed in his meditations; and twice, after listening as I had seen him on my first arrival, he excused himself and left the table abruptly. “You and Rannie are such old friends, you mustn’t mind him to-night,” Mrs. Churchill said to me apologetically, while he was out of the room; “this terrible affair of the seismaphone has upset us both completely.” That was the only mention of the subject during dinner; but after we had sat in the library a little while discussing trivial topics, such as Robert’s progress in school and the new furnishings of the house since my last visit, Churchill and I excused ourselves and went to his private room. “I may as well start at the very beginning,” he said as he threw himself down languidly in an easy chair, after drawing out from under the table a long, narrow box, which he placed in his lap.