He drew a chair to the table beside me, and, taking a pen, ran down a sheet of paper, writing without hesitation one after the other,—first the weak signature and then the strong,—so accurately that when I took the page and compared it with the originals standing between them I could not detect the slightest difference, and so stated.
"Yet you are a fair penman," said the professor, complacently, "and as good a judge of the matter as most of those who are usually ten experts. Now, I could point out in five minutes a dozen things which should prove conclusively not only that the same man did not write them but could not have written them. Indeed, that is the basis of the science of chirographic comparison. There really is no such thing as counterfeiting another's signature. Every man puts himself into his handwriting; and the business of the scientific expert is to get at his identity from the traces he leaves. It can always be done, and done with absolute certainty, too, if skill and time and brain enough are applied to the task."
"I suppose a man is always the best judge of his own handwriting," I remarked.
"Not at all. Indeed, the most skilful man may easily forget his own work. I remember once finding a stanza written in an album that lay upon the centre-table at a country inn. I thought it exceedingly well done, and, after copying it once or twice, took it to the landlord and asked him who did it. He told me a young man on his way West had stopped at his house, then in another State, and written the stanza at his daughter's request. He had a queer name, which the landlord had forgotten. He would call his wife, he said; perhaps she would remember. There was no need, I told him: the name was Cadmus,—as indeed it was, but a Cadmus of twenty-five years before, whom I could only have recreated by study of his work if the landlord had not helped me by the suggestion of time and place. I recognized, no doubt, a familiar hand, but could not locate it. It's so with this, too. I to have known it before somewhere and at some time."
He gazed with a perplexed look at the contrasted signatures.
"Did you ever have a face follow you around for days, claiming recognition—location? That is the way with this—I mean these signatures. They are written all over space to me now. If I close my eyes the whole orb of which I am the centre seems covered with those intermingled forms, all appealing to my memory for some associated idea. But I can't get hold of it. That is what has been troubling me so long.
"But now we will get on to the next stage. It is needless to examine ink or paper. The contested signature is in the same ink as the bulk of the admitted ones." He glanced over them with the lens as he spoke, as if to make sure of his conclusion. He stood silent for a time with knotted brows, and then exclaimed, "I wish I knew the man that answers to that name; and yet I am glad I do not. I believe I almost see him."
"You think they are all written by one person, then?"
"I am going to find out." he said, with a smile. "Now we will go and photograph them."
