A THUMB-

AXD WHAT CAVE OF IT,

805

from going on my knees and begging him to point out th^nj
who had murdered my wife and child ; but I managed to bridle r
tongue. I bided my time, and went on telling fortunes, as opportunity
oifered.

My apparatus was simple; a little red paint and a bit of white
paper. I painted the ball of the client's thumb, took a print of it on
the paper, studied it that night, and revealed his fortune to him next
day. What was my idea in this nonsense 1 It was this : "\Vhen I
was a youth, I knew an old Frenchman who had been a prison-keeper
for thirty years, and he told me that there was one thing about a
person which never changed, from the cradle to the grave—the lines
in the ball of the thumb; and he said that these lines were never exactly
alike in the thumbs of any two human beings. In these days, we
photograph the new criminal, and
hang his picture in the Rogues'
Gallery for future reference; but that
Frenchman, in his day, used to take a
print of the ball of a new prisoner's
thumb and p\it that away for future
reference. He always said that
pictures were no good—future dis-
guises could make them useless', * The
thumb's the only sure thing,' said
he; * you can't disguise that.* And

he used to prove his theory, too, on my friends and acquaintances;
it always succeeded.

I went on telling fortunes. Every night I shut myself in, all
alone, and studied the day's thumb-prints with a magnifying-glass.
Imagine the devouring eagerness with which I pored over those mazy
red spirals, with that document by my side which bore the right-hand
thumb-and-finger-marks of that unknown murderer, printed with the
dearest blood—to me—that was ever shed on this earth ! And many
and many a time I had to repeat the same old disappointed remark,
* will they never correspond !*

But my reward came at last. It was the print of the thumb of the
ibrty-third man of Company 0 whom I had experimented on—Private
Franz Adler. An hour before, I did not know the murderer's name,

THUMB-FEISTS.