usly, pushed open the door.

It was known in the boarding-house that the remodeling of the Second
Hall Back into a private bathroom for Nicolovius had been done at his
own expense, and rumor had it that for his two rooms--his "suite," as
Mrs. Paynter called it--he paid down the sum of eighteen dollars weekly.
The bed-sitting-room into which he now ushered his guest was the
prettiest room ever seen by Mr. Queed, who had seen few pretty rooms in
his life. Certainly it was a charming room of a usual enough type:
lamp-lit and soft-carpeted; brass fittings about the fireplace where a
coal fire glowed; a large red reading-table with the customary litter of
books and periodicals; comfortable chairs to sit in; two uncommonly
pretty mahogany bookcases with quaint leaded windows. The crude central
identity about all bedrooms that had hitherto come within Queed's ken,
to wit, the bed, seemed in this remarkable room to be wanting
altogether. For how was he, with his practical inexperience, to know
that the handsome leather lounge in the bay-window had its in'ards
crammed full of sheets, and blankets, and hinges and collapsible legs?

The young man gravitated instinctively toward the bookcases. His expert
eye swept over the titles, and his gloom lightened a little.

"You have some fair light reading here, I see," he said, plucking out a
richly bound volume of Lecky's _History of European Morals_.

Nicolovius, who was observing him closely, smiled to himself. "Ah, yes.
I'm the merest dilettante, without your happiness of being a specialist
of authority."

The old professor was a tall man, though somewhat stooped and shrunken,
and his head was as bare of hair as the palm of your hand; which of
course was why he wore the black silk skull cap about the house. On the
contrary his mustaches were singularly long and luxuriant, they, and the
short, smart goatee, being of a peculiar deep auburn shade. His eyes
were dark, brilliant, and slightly sardonic; there were yellow pouches
under them and deep transverse furrows on his forehead; his nose, once
powerfully aquiline, appeared to have been broken cleanly across the
middle. Taken all in all, he was a figure to be noticed in any company.

He came forward on his rubber heels and stood at his guest's elbow.

"Your field is science, I believe? This Spencer was bound for me years
ago, by a clever devil in Pittsburg, of all places; Huxley, too. My
Darwin is hit and miss. Mill is here; Hume;