knowledge was greater than his wisdom, and his powers were far superior
to his character. The small bright eyes, buried deeply in his fleshy
face, twinkled with intelligence and an unabated curiosity of life, but
they were the eyes of a sensualist and an egotist. Enough of the man,
for he is dead now, poor devil, dead at the very time that he had made
sure that he had at last discovered the elixir of life. It is not with
his complex character that I have to deal, but with the very strange
and inexplicable incident which had its rise in my visit to him in the
early spring of the year '82.

I had known Dacre in England, for my researches in the Assyrian Room of
the British Museum had been conducted at the time when he was
endeavouring to establish a mystic and esoteric meaning in the
Babylonian tablets, and this community of interests had brought us
together. Chance remarks had led to daily conversation, and that to
something verging upon friendship. I had promised him that on my next
visit to Paris I would call upon him. At the time when I was able to
fulfil my compact I was living in a cottage at Fontainebleau, and as
the evening trains were inconvenient, he asked me to spend the night in
his house.

"I have only that one spare couch," said he, pointing to a broad sofa
in his large salon; "I hope that you will manage to be comfortable
there."

It was a singular bedroom, with its high walls of brown volumes, but
there could be no more agreeable furniture to a bookworm like myself,
and there is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle
reek which comes from an ancient book. I assured him that I could
desire no more charming chamber, and no more congenial surroundings.

"If the fittings are neither convenient nor conventional, they are at
least costly," said he, looking round at his shelves. "I have expended
nearly a quarter of a million of money upon these objects which
surround you. Books, weapons, gems, carvings, tapestries,
images--there is hardly a thing here which has not its history, and it
is generally one worth telling."

He was seated as he spoke at one side of the open fire-place, and I at
the other. His reading-table was on his right, and the strong lamp
above it ringed it with a very vivid circle of golden light. A
half-rolled palimpsest lay in the centre, and around it were many
quaint articles of bric-a-brac. One of these was a large funnel, such
as is used for filling wine