god set
in a portrait gallery of illustrious baboons.

"What have we got to do?" I asked when we had found a vacant seat. "Do
you want to look up the catalogue?"

"No, I have the tickets in my bag. The books are waiting in the 'kept
books' department."

I placed my hat on the leather-covered shelf, dropped her gloves into
it--how delightfully intimate and companionable it seemed!--altered the
numbers on the tickets, and then we proceeded together to the "kept
books" desk to collect the volumes that contained the material for our
day's work.

It was a blissful afternoon. Two and a half hours of happiness
unalloyed did I spend at that shiny, leather-clad desk, guiding my
nimble pen across the pages of the notebook. It introduced me to a new
world--a world in which love and learning, sweet intimacy and crusted
archeology, were mingled into the oddest, most whimsical and most
delicious confection that the mind of man can conceive. Hitherto,
these recondite histories had been far beyond my ken. Of the wonderful
heretic, Amenhotep the Fourth, I had already heard--at the most he had
been a mere name; the Hittites a mythical race of undetermined habitat;
while cuneiform tablets had presented themselves to my mind merely as
an uncouth kind of fossil biscuit suited to the digestion of a
prehistoric ostrich.

Now all this was changed. As we sat with our chairs creaking together
and she whispered the story of those stirring times into my receptive
ear--talking is strictly forbidden in the reading-room--the disjointed
fragments arranged themselves into a romance of supreme fascination.
Egyptian, Babylonian, Aramean, Hittite, Memphis, Babylon, Hamath,
Megiddo--I swallowed them all thankfully, wrote them down, and asked
for more. Only once did I disgrace myself. An elderly clergyman of
ascetic and acidulous aspect had passed us with a glance of evident
disapproval, clearly setting us down as intruding philanderers; and
when I contrasted the parson's probable conception of the whispered
communications that were being poured into my ear so tenderly and
confidentially with the dry reality, I chuckled aloud. But my fair
taskmistress only paused, with her finger on the page, smilingly to
rebuke me, and then went on with the dictation. She was certainly a
Tartar for work.

It was a proud moment for me when, in response to my interrogative
"Yes?" my companion said "That is all" and closed the book. We had
extracted the p