DEAD WEIGHT
called Ramaswamy? in Madras?” and the like; in short, he
turned the world upside down to produce laboured disproof of
the statements—themselves impossible in nature—of a Paris
penny dreadful of the class of Nick Carter and Deadwood Dick.
Relentlessly does he demolish his adversary. If Camden
is spent Campden (which might happen to the best of French
authors) he shrieks [séc/ / /]. Many other remarks of the
future saint display a lack of any sense of proportion or
humour which was deplorable, and, by his best friends,
deplored.
It was also unfortunate in a way that a book purporting
to deal exhaustively with the inmost cabinet secrets of high-
grade Freemasonry should be written by one who was not
even a craft Mason.
The ?result was that Dr. Wynn Westcott having been
made to swear by all his gods that he was zof Consulting
Chemist to the British Government Underground Secret
Poison Factory at Gibraltar, and that he had never received
at his house a lady whom everybody but himself and the
future saint (for in the whirligigs and revenges and, so to
speak, Cochons Volants of time such was to be!) knew to be
the absinthe or galette-begotten image in the mind of a French
fumiste who had never in his brightest hours hoped to be
taken seriously by as much as a rag-picker—people began to
wonder what was the truth beneath the stories which West-
cott was at such pains to deny.
1 Waite quotes the commonest name in all South India as if it were some-
thing too fantastic for belief.
2 Please make paragraph read clearly.—Printer’s Reader. Heaven forgive
you!—Ed. Can’t you see that I’m trying to write like Waite ?—A. Q.
213