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sand stationery stores in New York, and these gave no clue. I took the letters down to a prominent firm of typewriter manufacturers, in the hope that in some way they might be able to identify the machine that had written them, but although they found it was one of their machines, they told me they had no way of telling which one of them it was, as there were several million of them in use. Once we found the machine we suspected of writing the notes, we would have no trouble identifying it, as most typewriting machines have a character of their own. No two write exactly alike, nor do any two typists type exactly alike, but until we found some machine we could fasten a suspicion on, it was absolutely useless.

The newspapers, of course, were full of the mystery, and I spent some of the morning talking to reporters at the theater. Finally they were convinced that they had been told everything that I or anyone else knew. They played up the news gorgeously, crowding the League of Nations into the second page and France’s cries of anguish about the fact that she was expected to pay her just debts into the page of shipping news.

But there was absolutely no forward movement in the case. We were blocked at every side by a wall of lack of knowledge. I wandered around the stage of the theater, snooped into all the dressing rooms, not quite knowing just what it was I expected to find. After lunch Ike Humbert came in, and im-