d by workaday standards, and the thoughts
and actions of lovers foolish beyond measure. But the workaday
standard is the wrong one, after all; for the utilitarian mind does but
busy itself with the trivial and transitory interests of life, behind
which looms the great and everlasting reality of the love of man and
woman. There is more significance in a nightingale's song in the hush
of a summer night than in all the wisdom of Solomon (who, by the way,
was not without his little experiences of the tender passion).

The janitor in the little glass box by the entrance to the library
inspected us and passed us on, with a silent benediction, to the lobby,
whence (when I had handed my stick to a bald-headed demigod and
received a talismanic disc in exchange) we entered the enormous rotunda
of the reading-room.

I have often thought that, if some lethal vapor of highly preservative
properties--such as formaldehyde, for instance--could be shed into the
atmosphere of this apartment, the entire and complete collection of
books and book-worms would be well worth preserving, for the
enlightenment of posterity, as a sort of anthropological appendix to
the main collection of the Museum. For, surely, nowhere else in the
world are so many strange and abnormal human beings gathered together
in one place. And a curious question that must have occurred to many
observers is: Whence do these singular creatures come, and whither do
they go when the very distinct-faced clock (adjusted to literary
eyesight) proclaims closing time? The tragic-faced gentleman, for
instance, with the corkscrew ringlets that bob up and down like spiral
springs as he walks? Or the short, elderly gentleman in the black
cassock and bowler hat, who shatters your nerves by turning suddenly
and revealing himself as a middle-aged woman? Whither do they go? One
never sees them elsewhere. Do they steal away at closing time into the
depths of the Museum and hide themselves until morning in sarcophagi or
mummy cases? Or do they creep through spaces in the book-shelves and
spend the night behind the volumes in a congenial atmosphere of leather
and antique paper? Who can say? What I do know is that when Ruth
Bellingham entered the reading-room she appeared in comparison with
these like a creature of another order; even as the head of Antinous,
which formerly stood (it has since been moved) amidst the
portrait-busts of the Roman Emperors, seemed like the head of a