The Bleeding Lamb here cast me a knowing glance, which said as plainly as words that his unfortunate acquaintance was mad, but that it was as well to humour him, and so he magnanimously sat down on a stool facing his rival, while the latter proceeded to read out his book, which was destined soon to mount up the long list of Short's sins of typographical omissions. This was but the herald of a long series of readings from the "short treatise," which were carried on at intervals for some weeks. Minute after minute and hour after hour Gresham drawled on from one tedious reiteration to another, never raising his voice nor altering its key, till a sense of dizziness overcame his audience, and his voice became as the singing in one's ears which accompanies high fever or heralds a faint. Indeed I have never suffered from fever or faintness since that date without my sensations recalling Gresham's dreary, argumentative drawl; then gradually his voice would grow fainter and somewhat spasmodic, until at length it gave way to snores, as the weary Lamb and the atheist Lion, like the kid and the leopard of Isaiah, sank down together in a confused heap on the floor, and there slept out a miniature fulfilment of the word of the prophet. Then there was a Polish count who found his way to the _Tocsin_--a most deplorable aristocratic débris, who might have stepped straight out of the pages of Dostoievsky. I never set eyes on a more depressed-looking mortal than Count Voblinsky. He looked as though he bore on his bent shoulders the weight of all the ill-spent lives in Christendom. He was a damp, unwholesome-looking man, whose appearance suggested long confinement in a cellar. He was pale and hollow-eyed, and almost mouldy; altogether a most cadaverous-looking person. He was always attired, even at eleven A.M., in an old dress suit, green and threadbare with age, and a furry tall hat, into which garments he seemed to have grown and taken root. But despite the decay of his person and his attire, there was a certain degree of aristocratic refinement about Voblinsky's features, last ghastly traces of his ancient nobility. He vaguely recalled to my mind a long-ago Continental trip of my childhood, and an unfortunate elephant in the Marseilles Jardin des Plantes who, from long inactivity in the corner of his cage, had become overgrown with moss. There was the same incongruous touch of erstwhile nobility, the same decay, the same earthy smell. By what shady and circuitous paths had the unfortunate count reached this unhappy pass? Perhaps his wife was responsible; for if ever woman was calculated not to lead her mate on to higher and better things it was the Countess Voblinska. The countess was worse than slovenly: she was downright dirty. Her tumbled, frowsy hair, with patches of golden dye in it, was surmounted by an appalling hat of incongruous dimensions and shape, trimmed with what appeared to be archaeological relics, thick in dust. To approach it brought on a