This planchette business had a somewhat curious ending. A few nights later Jacobsen was working it and asked me to put a question. To oblige him I inquired on what day we should reach Fremantle, the port of Perth. It wrote an answer which, I may remark, subsequently proved to be quite correct. “That is not a good question,” said Jacobsen, “since as a sailor I might guess the reply. Try again, Mr. Arbuthnot.” “Will anything remarkable happen on our voyage to the South Seas?” I inquired casually. The planchette hesitated a while then wrote rapidly and stopped. Jacobsen took up the paper and began to read the answer aloud—“To A, B the D, and B the C, the most remarkable things will happen that have happened to men living in the world.” “That must mean me, Bickley the doctor and Bastin the clergyman,” I said, laughing. Jacobsen paid no attention, for he was reading what followed. As he did so I saw his face turn white and his eyes begin to start from his head. Then suddenly he tore the paper in pieces which he thrust into his pocket. Lifting his great fist he uttered some Danish oath and with a single blow smashed the planchette to fragments, after which he strode away, leaving me astonished and somewhat disturbed. When I met him the next morning I asked him what was on the paper. “Oh!” he said quietly, “something I should not like you too-proper English gentlemens to see. Something not nice. You understand. Those spirits not always good; they do that kind of thing sometimes. That’s why I broke up this planchette.” Then he began to talk of something else and there the matter ended. I should have said that, principally with a view to putting themselves in a position to confute each other, ever since we had started from Marseilles both Bastin and Bickley spent a number of hours each day in assiduous study of the language of the South Sea Islands. It became a kind of competition between them as to which could learn the most. Now Bastin, although simple and even stupid in some ways, was a good scholar, and as I knew at college, had quite a faculty for acquiring languages in which he had taken high marks at examinations. Bickley, too, was an extraordinarily able person with an excellent memory, especially when he was on his mettle. The result was that before we ever reached a South Sea island they had a good working knowledge of the local tongues.