“If you please, sir, when the postman brought it he told me that they’d bored the holes in the lid at the post-office.  There were no breathin’ holes in the lid, sir, and they didn’t want the animal to die.  That is all, sir.”

“It’s culpably careless of the man, whoever he was,” said Eustace, as he removed the screws, “packing an animal like this in a wooden box with no means of getting air.  Confound it all!  I meant to ask Morton to bring me a cage to put it in.  Now I suppose I shall have to get one myself.”

He placed a heavy book on the lid from which the screws had been removed, and went into the billiard-room.  As he came back into the library with an empty cage in his hand he heard the sound of something falling, and then of something scuttling along the floor.

“Bother it!  The beast’s got out.  How in the world am I to find it again in this library!”

To search for it did indeed seem hopeless.  He tried to follow the sound of the scuttling in one of the recesses where the animal seemed to be running behind the books in the shelves, but it was impossible to locate it.  Eustace resolved to go on quietly reading.  Very likely the animal might gain confidence and show itself.  Saunders seemed to have dealt in his usual methodical manner with most of the correspondence.  There were still the private letters.

What was that?  Two sharp clicks and the lights in the hideous candelabra that hung from the ceiling suddenly went out.

“I wonder if something has gone wrong with the fuse,” said Eustace, as he went to the switches by the door.  Then he stopped.  There was a noise at the other end of the room, as if something was crawling up the iron corkscrew stair.  “If it’s gone into the gallery,” he said, “well and good.”  He hastily turned on the lights, crossed the room, and climbed up the stair.  But he could see nothing.  His grandfather had placed a little gate at the top of the stair, so that children could run and romp in the gallery without fear of accident.  This Eustace closed, and having considerably narrowed the circle of his search, returned to his desk by the fire.

How gloomy the library was!  There was no sense of intimacy about the room.  The few busts that an eighteenth-century Borlsover had brought back from the grand tour, might have been in keeping in the old library.  Here they seemed out of place.  They made the room feel cold, in spite of the heavy red damask curtains and great gilt cornices.

With a crash two heavy books fell from the gallery to the floor; then, as Borlsover looked, another and yet another.

“Very well; you’ll starve for this, my beauty!” he said.  “We’ll do some little experiments on the metabolism of rats deprived of water.  Go on!  Chuck them down!  I think I’ve got the upper hand.”  He turned once again to his correspondence.  The letter was from the family solicitor.  It spoke of his uncle’s death and of the valuable collection of books that had been left to him in the will.