Adventure Magazine Cover — page 93: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

92 Adventure silver. If it could only have reproduced the pantomime visions that had passed through its brilliant crystalline depth, and vanished! The spaciousness of the thing—it extended from ceiling to floor—was such that for the first time I seemed really to see myself in a mirror; and I lingered perhaps a suspi- ciously long while for one who was under the opinion that -he had no use for a looking- glass beyond watching it as he practised variations of false shuffles and bottom- dealing. The drawers and writing-desk gave up nothing that I wanted, and I replaced every- ‘thing with a care that left no appearance of their having been disturbed. I then went into boxes and discovered more of those adornments used in the mysterious ritual of making a woman beautiful; and was al- most unpleasantly affected by the profusion of scent, the perfume, that arose. It would be endless to attempt to men- tion, even in my ignorant inadequate way, the numerous bottles and jars and queer little instruments that were on and _ in, and seemed almost to float and hover about, the expansive dréssing-table. I have rather idly wished that I had taken the time to count merely the hats that I peeped at; there were at least twenty, and Iam wilfully conservative. But I found nothing I cared to meddle with. Then I went into the trunks, not deeply of course, for where I discovered layers of cloth I turned aside. The greatest secrets in the world might have been hidden in the folds, but the search would have been too labyrinthine, an infinite labor. @Much that I stumbled on to was undoubtedly a part of the trappings and paraphernalia used on the stage; but I limited my prying mostly to the tills and-their compartments. ~ And when I came to a little steamer trunk that was practically empty, and contained stuff of one kind and another—pieces of ribbon, wired trimmings, and such—that seemed of no importance, my first impulse was to pass on. But I was attracted to this trunk by its resemblance to another I had seen, and had something to do with, once upon a time in assisting a very good friend who had reasons of his own for not wishing the almost unfoolable customs officers to know too much about him and his business. He told me then that trunks of the kind were made with secrecy, sold at a high price and in an extremely limited number only to trustworthy persons. They were innocent-looking things, and dis- tinctive in appearance only through little “ornaments” that disguised certain me- chanical necessities of the workmanship; and in order to make these trunks serve the purpose for which they were intended the market was occasionally flooded by others, entirely “innocent” but the external dupli- cate of the smuggler’s case. All of which seems a rather elalerate prelude to the statement that these trunks merely had a false top, a false bottom, and false sides. But they were so firmly and _ masterfully made, the hidden space so well calculated, that they were entirely above casual suspicion, and, unless one knew the designed way of opening them, could not be investigated except with an ax. What it amounted to was two trunks, so carefully weighted and adjusted that no one of them could be distinguished from the more com- mon trunk that any merchant might have. The device was originally invented, I understood, at the expense of a certain European government that wished to give its diplomatic service a safe conveyance; but the inventor was tempted beyond his patriotism and sold the secret to a rival government; and then, perfecting it in a most unexpectedly simple way, was again tempted by gentlemen sufficiently inter- ested in a safe smuggling-conveyance to become a silent partner in a trunk-manu- facturing establishment. A roundabout way, indeed, of saying that I came upon what I thought I wanted to find. I pressed two little “ornaments” at once and lifted out the false bottom, and I came upon papers in varying conditions of age, all written in some outlandish language ‘of which I—a reader of French, a speller-out of German, and a fumbler in one or two other languages since the exercise of dab- bling with them has entertained idle morn- ings—knew nothing. I made a selection that could scarcely be called judicious, but ~ trusted to luck to appropriate something that might eventually be of service. So I helped myself in the false bottom of Zoronna’s trunk; but when I had lifted out the lid I came upon some photographs, | Many of these were photographs of Zoronna, at all periods of her career, theatri- cal photographs, which she seemed to cherish, (CCOPMICLOOOL SRE)