It is true that I intersperse my researches with some more attractive studies, and one or two visits to the picture-galleries, and more than an occasional evening at the theatre.  My uncle knows nothing of this.  To keep him soothed I am careful to get my reader’s ticket renewed every month, and every month to send him the ticket just out of date, signed by M. Leopold Delisle.  He has a box full of them; and in the simplicity of his heart Monsieur Mouillard has a lurking respect for this nephew, this modern young anchorite, who spends his days at the National Library, his nights with Gaius, wholly absorbed in the Junian Latins, and indifferent to whatsoever does not concern the Junian Latins in this Paris which my uncle still calls the Modern Babylon.

I came down this morning in the most industrious mood, when the misfortune befell.  Close by the sanctum where the librarians sit are two desks where you write down the list of the books you want.  I was doing so at the right-hand desk, on which abuts the first row of tables.  Hence all the mischief.  Had I written at the left-hand desk, nothing would have happened.  But no; I had just set down as legibly as possible the title, author, and size of a certain work on Roman Antiquities, when, in replacing the penholder, which is attached there by a small brass chain, some inattentiveness, some want of care, my ill-luck, in short, led me to set it down in unstable equilibrium on the edge of the desk.  It tumbled-I heard the little chain rattle-it tumbled farther-then stopped short.  The mischief was done.  The sudden jerk, as it pulled up, had detached an enormous drop of ink from the point of the pen, and that drop—­Ah!  I can see him yet, as he rose from the shadow of the desk, that small, white-haired man, so thin and so very angry!

“Clumsy idiot!  To blot an Early Text!”

I leaned over and looked.  Upon the page of folio, close to an illuminated capital, the black drop had flattened itself.  Around the original sphere had been shed splashes of all conceivable shapes-rays, rockets, dotted lines, arrowheads, all the freakish impromptu of chaos.  Next, the slope lending its aid, the channels had drained into one, and by this time a black rivulet was crawling downward to the margin.  One or two readers near had risen, and now eyed me like examining magistrates.  I waited for an outbreak, motionless, dazed, muttering words that did not mend the case at all.  “What a pity!  Oh, I’m so sorry!  If I had only known—­” The student of the Early Text stood motionless as I. Together we watched the ink trickle.  Suddenly, summoning his wits together, he burrowed with feverish haste in his morocco writing-case, pulled out a sheet of blotting-paper, and began to soak up the ink with the carefulness of a Sister of Mercy stanching a wound.  I seized the opportunity to withdraw discreetly to the third row of tables, where the attendant had just deposited my books.  Fear is so unreasoning.  Very likely by saying