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He identified himself as Joseph Crawford, offered to pay $5 a week for a 12 by 12 room on the third floor at the rear end of the long gloomy hallway and arrived the next day at Mrs. Balmer's faded tenement with an equally faded trunk. Nothing happened. But when Mrs. Balmer entered the room the following morning to straighten it up she found several innovations.
Balmer was worried over the thought that this man was probably an experimenter. He probably fussed around with things as an old crank does sometimes, and he would end by burning down the house or blowing it up accidentally. But Mrs. Balmer's fears were removed one evening when she happened to look down the gloomy hallway and notice that this man's door was open.
As the result, not only all the nine white-star lines were photographed from a brilliant sun-flame, but five additional ones were found to continue the series upward. The wave-lengths of these last had, moreover, been calculated beforehand with singular exactness, from a simple formula known as "Balmer's Law."
Thus, by the means of stellar light-analysis, acquaintance was first made with the ultra-violet spectrum of hydrogen; and its harmonic character, as expressed by "Balmer's Law," supplies a sure test for discriminating, among newly discovered lines, those that appertain from those that are unrelated to it.
And the police sergeant, resting his chin on his elbow, leaned forward on his high stool and peered through the partition window at the landlady and said nothing. Or rather, he said: "don't know. That's the way with people sometimes. They get afraid." This man came to Mrs. Balmer's rooming-house in Huron Street when it was spring. He was a short, stocky man with a leathery face and little eyes.
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