Jacob’s walking-stick was like all the others; they had muddled the pigeon-holes perhaps.

There is in the British Museum an enormous mind.  Consider that Plato is there cheek by jowl with Aristotle; and Shakespeare with Marlowe.  This great mind is hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it.  Nevertheless (as they take so long finding one’s walking-stick) one can’t help thinking how one might come with a notebook, sit at a desk, and read it all through.  A learned man is the most venerable of all—­a man like Huxtable of Trinity, who writes all his letters in Greek, they say, and could have kept his end up with Bentley.  And then there is science, pictures, architecture,—­an enormous mind.

They pushed the walking-stick across the counter.  Jacob stood beneath the porch of the British Museum.  It was raining.  Great Russell Street was glazed and shining—­here yellow, here, outside the chemist’s, red and pale blue.  People scuttled quickly close to the wall; carriages rattled rather helter-skelter down the streets.  Well, but a little rain hurts nobody.  Jacob walked off much as if he had been in the country; and late that night there he was sitting at his table with his pipe and his book.

The rain poured down.  The British Museum stood in one solid immense mound, very pale, very sleek in the rain, not a quarter of a mile from him.  The vast mind was sheeted with stone; and each compartment in the depths of it was safe and dry.  The night-watchmen, flashing their lanterns over the backs of Plato and Shakespeare, saw that on the twenty-second of February neither flame, rat, nor burglar was going to violate these treasures—­poor, highly respectable men, with wives and families at Kentish Town, do their best for twenty years to protect Plato and Shakespeare, and then are buried at Highgate.

Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions and heat of the brain.  Only here the brain is Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and little jewels, and crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body well for its long sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toes scrupulously to the East.  Meanwhile, Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles; in spite of the woman in the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has come home drunk and cries all night long, “Let me in!  Let me in!”

In the street below Jacob’s room voices were raised.

But he read on.  For after all Plato continues imperturbably.  And Hamlet utters his soliloquy.  And there the Elgin Marbles lie, all night long, old Jones’s lantern sometimes recalling Ulysses, or a horse’s head; or sometimes a flash of gold, or a mummy’s sunk yellow cheek.  Plato and Shakespeare continue; and Jacob, who was reading the Phaedrus, heard people vociferating round the lamp-post, and the woman battering at the door and crying, “Let me in!” as if a coal had dropped from the fire, or a fly, falling from the ceiling, had lain on its back, too weak to turn over.