eople there?"

"Usual sort of number."

"What did they look like?"

Soames tried to visualize them.

"They all," he presently remembered, "looked very like one another."

My mind took a fearsome leap.

"All dressed in sanitary woolen?"

"Yes, I think so. Grayish-yellowish stuff."

"A sort of uniform?" He nodded. "With a number on it perhaps--a
number on a large disk of metal strapped round the left arm? D. K. F.
78,910--that sort of thing?" It was even so. "And all of them, men
and women alike, looking very well cared for? Very Utopian, and
smelling rather strongly of carbolic, and all of them quite hairless?"
I was right every time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and
women were hairless or shorn. "I hadn't time to look at them very
closely," he explained.

"No, of course not. But--"

"They stared at ME, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of
attention." At last he had done that! "I think I rather scared them.
They moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about, at a
distance, wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle
seemed to have a sort of panic whenever I went to make inquiries."

"What did you do when you arrived?"

Well, he had gone straight to the catalogue, of course,--to the S
volumes,--and had stood long before SN-SOF, unable to take this volume
out of the shelf because his heart was beating so. At first, he said,
he wasn't disappointed; he only thought there was some new arrangement.
He went to the middle desk and asked where the catalogue of
twentieth-century books was kept. He gathered that there was still
only one catalogue. Again he looked up his name, stared at the three
little pasted slips he had known so well. Then he went and sat down
for a long time.

"And then," he droned, "I looked up the 'Dictionary of National
Biography,' and some encyclopedias. I went back to the middle desk and
asked what was the best modern book on late nineteenth-century
literature. They told me Mr. T. K. Nupton's book was considered the
best. I looked it up in the catalogue and filled in a form for it. It
was brought to me. My name wasn't in the index, but--yes!" he said
with a sudden change of tone, "that's what I'd forgotten. Where's that
bit of paper? Give it me back."

I, too, had forgotten that cryptic screed. I found it fallen on the
floor, and handed it to him.

He smoothed it out, nodding and smiling at me disagreeably.

"I found