“All right, sweetheart, I’ll be through by noon for sure—by noon for sure. Run along and play now, like a good little girl.” 

 Virginia Maxon shrugged her shapely shoulders and shook her head hopelessly at the forbidding panels of the door. 

 “My dolls are all dressed for the day,” she cried, “and I’m tired of making mud pies—I want you to come out and play with me.” But Professor Maxon did not reply—he had returned to view his grim operations, and the hideousness of them had closed his ears to the sweet tones of the girl’s voice. 

 As she turned to retrace her steps to the floor below Miss Maxon still shook her head. 

 “Poor old Daddy,” she mused, “were I a thousand years old, wrinkled and toothless, he would still look upon me as his baby girl.” 

 If you chance to be an alumnus of Cornell you may recall Professor Arthur Maxon, a quiet, slender, white-haired gentleman, who for several years was an assistant professor in one of the departments of natural science. Wealthy by inheritance, he had chosen the field of education for his life work solely from a desire to be of some material benefit to mankind since the meager salary which accompanied his professorship was not of sufficient import to influence him in the slightest degree. 

 Always keenly interested in biology, his almost unlimited means had permitted him to undertake, in secret, a series of daring experiments which had carried him so far in advance of the biologists of his day that he had, while others were still groping blindly for the secret of life, actually reproduced by chemical means the great phenomenon. 

 Fully alive to the gravity and responsibilities of his marvellous discovery he had kept the results of his experimentation, and even the experiments themselves, a profound secret not only from his colleagues, but from his only daughter, who heretofore had shared his every hope and aspiration. 

 It was the very success of his last and most pretentious effort that had placed him in the horrifying predicament in which he now found himself—with the corpse of what was apparently a human being in his workshop and no available explanation that could possibly be acceptable to a matter-of-fact and unscientific police. 

 Had he told them the truth they would have laughed at him. Had he said: “This is not a human being that you see, but the remains of a 

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