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"All right, sweetheart, I'll be through by noon for sure--by noon for sure. Run

along and play now, like a good little girl."

Virginia Maxon shrugged her shapely shoulders and shook her head hopelessly at

the forbidding panels of the door.

"My dolls are all dressed for the day," she cried, "and I'm tired of making mud

pies--I want you to come out and play with me." But Professor Maxon did not

reply--he had returned to view his grim operations, and the hideousness of them

had closed his ears to the sweet tones of the girl's voice.

As she turned to retrace her steps to the floor below Miss Maxon still shook her

head.

"Poor old Daddy," she mused, "were I a thousand years old, wrinkled and

toothless, he would still look upon me as his baby girl."

If you chance to be an alumnus of Cornell you may recall Professor Arthur

Maxon, a quiet, slender, white-haired gentleman, who for several years was an

assistant professor in one of the departments of natural science. Wealthy by

inheritance, he had chosen the field of education for his life work solely from a

desire to be of some material benefit to mankind since the meager salary which

accompanied his professorship was not of sufficient import to influence him in

the slightest degree.

Always keenly interested in biology, his almost unlimited means had permitted

him to undertake, in secret, a series of daring experiments which had carried him

so far in advance of the biologists of his day that he had, while others were still

groping blindly for the secret of life, actually reproduced by chemical means the

great phenomenon.

Fully alive to the gravity and responsibilities of his marvellous discovery he had

kept the results of his experimentation, and even the experiments themselves, a

profound secret not only from his colleagues, but from his only daughter, who

heretofore had shared his every hope and aspiration.

It was the very success of his last and most pretentious effort that had placed

him in the horrifying predicament in which he now found himself--with the

corpse of what was apparently a human being in his workshop and no available

explanation that could possibly be acceptable to a matter-of-fact and unscientific

police.

Had he told them the truth they would have laughed at him. Had he said: "This

is not a human being that you see, but the remains of a chemically produced

The Monster Men