When the bibliographer’s eagle eye first fell upon this passage he was staggered.  Then, on reflection, he found himself in an awkward predicament—­his natural modesty as a man contending with a no less natural and legitimate pride and desire as historian that the fruits of his labours should not be lost.

“These,” he said, “are the dilemmas which confront the conscientious annotator.”

What position was he to take up?  Should he exclude the miserable joke altogether from his amended and enlarged edition of Perrelli?  He did not feel himself justified in this line of conduct.  Some future investigator would be sure to unearth it and get the credit for his industry.  Should he re-state it in such terms as to make it palatable to refined readers, diluting its primary pungency without impairing its essential signification?  He was disposed to adopt that course, but, unfortunately, all attempts at verbal manipulation failed.  Good scholar as Mr. Eames was, the joke proved to be obdurate, uncompromising; vainly he wrestled with it; try as he would, it stood out naked and unashamed, refusing to be either cajoled or bullied into respectability.  There was no circumventing that joke, he decided.  Should he reproduce it there fore in EXTENSO?  Such, after mature deliberation and not without certain moral misgivings, he conceived to be his duty towards posterity.  Veiled in the obscurity of a learned tongue, the joke was surreptitiously introduced into the company of a thousand chaste footnotes that could dispense with such covering devices.

Of the subsequent history of the Saint Elias Fountain, which alone still continued to flow, the bibliographer also learned much—­how its fame had grown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries till it attracted invalids from the most distant provinces, necessitating the erection of a palatial pump-room for the better accommodations of visitors; how latterly again the waters had unaccountably fallen into disfavour with the public.  And this, notwithstanding the fact that in 1872 the celebrated Privy Councillor Dr. Saponaro, Director of the Montecitorio Home for Incurables, had written, at the urgent solicitation of the Nepenthe Town Authorities (who were alarmed at the decrease in their bathing-tax revenue) a pamphlet—­a pamphlet which, by the way, cost them a mint of money in view of the author’s deserved reputation as an incorruptible scientist—­a pamphlet extolling the virtue of the spring; proving, by elaborate chemical analysis, that its ingredients had not only not changed a white since the days of Monsignor Perrelli but actually improved in quality; and concluding with the warm recommendation that they were as well adapted as ever for curing those ailments to which the island population was peculiarly liable—­namely, the consequences of excessive lechery and alcohol, and the discomfort caused by ingrowing toe-nails.

The local deputy, Don Guistino Morena, had often promised his Nepenthean constituents to look into the matter and see that something was done.  But he was a busy man.  Up to the present he had apparently not moved a finger.