the bell, and was locked in. He tried in vain to
attract attention from the windows, for it was no pleasant prospect to
pass a night among so many ghosts. At last he saw a solitary woman,
and shouted to her that he was locked in. "No," she said, "you are
not. The Library is closed at four." Whether he spent the night among
the books is not known. Let us hope that he met with a less logical
person to release him from his cold prison.

Dr. Bandinell ruled supreme in his library, and even the Curators
trembled before him when he told them what had been the invariable
custom of the Library for years, and could not be altered. And,
curiously enough, he had always funds at his disposal, which is not
the case now, and whenever there was a collection of valuable MSS. in
the market he often prided himself on having secured it long before
any other library had the money ready. Now and then, it is true, he
allowed himself to be persuaded by a plausible seller of rare books
or MSS., but generally he was very wary. He was not always very
courteous to visitors, and still less so to his under-librarians. The
Oriental under-librarian Professor Reay, in particular, who was old
and somewhat infirm, had much to suffer from him, and the language in
which he was ordered about was such as would not now be addressed to
any menial. And yet Professor Reay belonged to a very good family,
though Dr. Bandinell would insist on calling him Ray, and declared
that he had no right to the e in his name. In revenge some people
would give him an additional i and call him Dr. Bandinelli, which made
him very angry, because, as he would say to me, "he had never been one
of those dirty foreigners." Silence was enjoined in the library, but
the librarian's voice broke through all rules of silence. I remember
once, when Professor Reay had been looking for ever so long to find
his spectacles without which he could not read the Arabic MSS., and
had asked everybody whether they had seen them, a voice came at last
thundering through the library: "You left your spectacles on my chair,
you old ----, and I sat on them!" There was an end of spectacles and
Arabic MSS. after that. There were two men only of whom Dr. Bandinell
and H. O. Coxe also were afraid, Dr. Pusey, who was one of the
Curators, and later on, Jowett, the Master of Balliol.

There was a vacancy in the Oriental sub-librarianship, and a very
distinguished young Hebrew scholar, William Wright, afterwards