Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 32: what you’re looking at

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

28 FRANCIS FLAGG ata restaurant, generally taking my dinners at the club. I may as well confess that I have a room rented in a down-town office building where I spend a few hours every day to work on my book, which is designed to be a critical analysis of the fallacies inherent in the Marxian theory of economics embracing at the same time a thorough refutation of Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society. A rather ambitious undertaking, you will admit, and one not apt to engage the interest of a person given to inventing wild yarns for the purpose of amazing his friends. No; I emphatically deny having invented the story. However, the future will talk for itself. I will merely proceed to put the details of my strange experience on paper (justice to myself demands that I should do so, so many garbled accounts have appeared in the press), and leave the reader to draw his own conclusions. _ - Contrary to my usual custom I had dined that evening with Hodge at the Flotel Oaks. Let me emphatically state that while it is well known among his intimates that Hodge carries a flask on his hip, I had absolutely nothing of an intoxicating nature to. drink. Hodge will verify this. About eight-thirty | refused an invitation to attend the theatre with him and went to my rooms. There I changed into smoking-jacket and slippers and lit a mild Havana. The rocking-chair was occupying its accustomed place near the center of the sit- ting-room floor. I remember that clearly because, as usual, I had either to push it aside or step around it, wondering for the thousandth time as I did so why that idiotic Jap persisted in placing it in such an inconvenient spot; and resolv- ing, also for the thousandth time, to speak to him about it. With a note-book and pencil placed on the stand beside me, also a copy of Friedrich Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1 turned on the light in my green-shaded reading lamp, switched off all others, and sank with a sigh of relief into the easy-chair. It was my intention to make a few notes from Engels’ work relative to plural marriages, showing that he contradicted cer- tain conclusions of Morgan’s when he said . . . But there; it is sufficient to state that after a few minutes’ work I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. I did not doze; I am positive of that. My mind was actively engaged in trying to piece together a sentence that would clearly express my thought. I can best describe what happened then by saying there was an explosion. It wasn’t that exactly; but at the time it seemed to me there must have been an explosion. A blinding flash of light registered with appalling vividness through the closed lids on the retina of my eyes. My first thought was that someone had dynamited the building; my second, that the electric fuses had blown out. It was some time before I could see clearly. When I could... “Good Lord,” I whispered weakly, “what’s that!” ‘ Occupying the space where the rocking-chair had stood (though I did not notice its absence at the time) was a cylinder of what appeared to be glass standing, I should judge, about five feet high. Encased in this cylinder seemed Gomicbe (0) Sits ‘gabe 4