Thin slate-colored fingers fumble nervously over the title backs. A second man, figure short, squat, red-faced, crowds the erratic scholar. A third. The rain is bringing them in in numbers. These are the basement students of the gargoyle philosophies, the gargoyle sciences, the gargoyle religions. Perpetual motion machine inventors, alchemists with staring, nervous-eyed medieval faces, fourth dimensionists, sun worshippers, cabalistic researchers, voodoo authorities--the old-book store is suddenly alive with them. They move about furtively with no word for one another, lost in their grotesque dreamings. * * * * * On a rainy day the city gives them up and they come puttering excitedly into the loop on a quest. The world is a garish unreality to them. The streets and the crowds of automatic-faced men and women, the upward rush of buildings and the horizontal rush of traffic are no more than vague grimacings. Life is something of which the streets are oblivious. But here on the gargoyle shelves, the high, shadowed shelves of the old book store--truth stands in all its terrible reality, wrapped in its authentic habiliments. Dr. Hickson of the psychopathic laboratory would give these curious rainy day phantasts identities as weird as the volumes they caress. But the old book store clerk is more kind. He lets them rummage. Before the rain ends they will buy "The Cradle of the Giants," "The Key to Satanism," Cornelius Agrippa's "Natural Magic," "The Astral Chord," "Occultism and Its Usages." They will buy books by Jacob Boehme, William Law, Sadler, Hyslop, Ramachaska. And they will go hurrying home with their treasures pressed close to them. Stuffy bedrooms lined with hints of Sabbatical horror, strewn with bizarre refuse; musty smelling books out of whose pages fantastic shapes rear themselves against the gaslights, macabre worlds in which unreason rides like a headless D'Artagnan; evenings in the park arguing suddenly with startled strangers on the existence of the philosophers' stone or the astrological causes of influenza--these form a background for the curious men whom the rain has drifted into the old book store and who stand with their eyes haunting the gargoyle titles.