story were rounded in their centers by the footsteps of past generations. There were smells. There was mustiness. There was squalor and evidences of neglect continued for a millennium. There were cobwebs and dirt and every indication of degradation; yet the door-lintels were carved stone from a time when a workman was an artisan and did the work of an artist. The back room was empty of everything but the grime of ages. Plaster had fallen, revealing older plaster behind it, and on the older plaster there were traces of color as if the walls had been painted in figures no longer to be made out. And there was one place, on the western wall, where the plaster was wet. A roughly square spot a foot-and-a-half by a foot-and-a-half, about a yard above the floor-level, glistening with moisture. In Coghlan's living-room, with Ghalil looking interestedly at him, Coghlan frowned. "There was nothing in the room. It was empty. There was no 'gadget' there as Duval's book declared."Ghalil said mildly: "The book was of the thirteenth century. Would you expect to find anything in a room after so long a time, so many lootings, the use of twenty generations?"
"I was guided only by Duval's book," said Coghlan with some irony. "You suspect that wet spot on the wall, eh?"
"I didn't understand it," admitted Coghlan, "and it was--peculiar. It was cold."
"Perhaps it is the gadget," said Ghalil. He said in mild reproof, "After you left, I felt it as you had done. It was very cold. I thought my hand would be frost-bitten, when I kept it there for some time. In fact, later I covered the spot with a blanket, and frost appeared under it!"
Coghlan said impatiently, "Not without refrigerating apparatus, and that's out of the question!"
Ghalil thought that over. "Yet it did appear."
"Would refrigerating apparatus be called a gadget?" Coghlan wondered.
The Turk shook his head. "It is peculiar. I learn that it is traditional that a spot on the plaster in that room has always been and will always be wet. It has been considered magical, and has given the place a bad name--which is one reason the house is empty. The legend is verifiable for sixty years. Refrigeration was not known in small units so long ago. Would that coldness be another impossibility of this affair?"
Coghlan said, "We talk nonsense all the time!"
Ghalil thought, again. "Could refrigeration be a lost art of the ancients?" he asked with a faint smile, "and if so, what has it to do with you and Mr. Mannard and this--Appolonius?"
"There aren't any lost arts," Coghlan assured him. "In olden times people did things at random, on what they thought were magical principles. Sometimes they got results. On magical reasoning, they used digitalis for the heart. It happened to be right, and they kept on. On magical reasoning, 

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