as he collects about him the works that are really of interest to him, as distinguished from those with which he has been obliged to occupy himself prior to taking his academic steps.  Then, as in the human frame every particle of bone and sinew is said to change in seven years, the student one day looks about him and recognises that hardly a book or a paper is there of all the store over which he was busied in those months before he took his degree, or sustained his disputation.  When a man has entered on his career, if he enters on it with a will, he soon finds that all books and objects not essential as tools for his work creep stealthily into the dusty corner, or to the inaccessible top shelf of the bookcase,—­or if he is very poor, to the second-hand bookshop.  He cannot afford to be hampered by any dead weight.

Now Dr. Claudius had gone through many changes of thought and habit since he came to Heidelberg ten years ago.  But he had never changed his quarters; for he loved the garret window and the isolation from visits and companions that he gained by his three flights of stairs.  The camp-bed in the corner was the same whereon he had lain after his first duel, with a bag of ice on his head and his bosom friend by his side, with a long pipe.  At that very table he had drawn his first caricature of Herr Professor Winkelnase, which had been framed and hung up in the “Kneipe”—­the drinking-hall of his corps; at the same board he had written his thesis for his doctorate, and here again he had penned the notes for his first lecture.  Professor Winkelnase was dead; not one of his old corps-brothers remained in Heidelberg, but still he clung to the old room.  The learned doctors with whom he drank his wine or his beer of an evening, when he sallied forth from his solitude, wondered at his way of living; for Dr. Claudius was not poor, as incomes go in South Germany.  He had a modest competence of his own to begin with, and his lectures brought him in something, so that he might have had a couple of rooms “parterre”—­as the Germans call the rez-de-chaussee—­and could have been as comfortable as he pleased.  But no one ever attempted to account for Dr. Claudius at all.  He was a credit to the University, where first-rate men are scarce,—­for Heidelberg is not a seat of very great learning; and no one troubled to inquire why he did not return to his native country when he had obtained his “Phil.D.”  Only, if he meant to spend the rest of his life in Heidelberg, it was high time he married and settled down to genuine “Philisterleben”—­at least so Dr. Wiener had said to Dr. Wurst over the second “schoppen” every night for a year past.