"Eight years," repeated the Principal in grave echo as my words failed. "Eight years' work: that would have cost a few hours to secure--a week, perhaps, to rearrange; and in twenty minutes or so--" He broke off. "You see that smoke?" he asked. "Over there by the two tall Wellingtonias? . . . There, sir, goes up the last trace of those eight years of our friend's devotion. Patience amounting to genius, loyalty to truth for truth's sake so absolute that one careless moment is dishonour, records calculated to a hair, tested, retested, worked over, brooded over--there's what in twenty minutes your Hun and your Goth can make of it in this world!" "But, sir," I broke in, "books and packed paper don't burn in that way! Foe's Regent-Park notes alone ran to thirty-two letter-cases when I saw them last. He brought home two bullock-trunks from Uganda, stuffed solid--" Sir Elkin wheeled about sharply. "Mr. Farrell," said he, "you had a letter in yesterday's _Times_." "If it had crossed my mind, Sir Elkin," pleaded Farrell with a wagging movement of his whole body, propitiatory, such as dogs make when they see the whip. "I do assure you--" "I seem to recollect," interrupted Sir Elkin, "your saying that considerable sums of public money were spent on our laboratories. The grant allocated to this College for research was so munificent that, after building a physiological laboratory with a small lecture-theatre, we had to house the professor himself in a match-boarded room covered with corrugated iron. Between them"-- he turned to me in swift explanation--"they made a furnace. . . . Yes, Mr. Farrell, and you asked why, if all is well inside my laboratories, I should fear the light. You would insist on knowing what you were paying for. . . . Well, here is the answer, sir--if it meet your demand." In the clearing where Jack's laboratory stood surrounded by turf and a ring of conifers, a dozen firemen were busy coiling and packing lengths of hose. The fire had been beaten; its last gasp was out; and the main building stood, smoke-stained, water-stained, with gaping sockets for windows, but with its roof apparently intact. The trees were scorched to leeward, and the turf was a trampled morass. Charred benches and desks, broken bottles, retorts, and glass cases, bestrewed it. But of Jack's sanctum--of the room in which I had been allowed to sit while he worked, because, as he put it, "I made no noise with my pipe"--nothing remained save a mound of ashes and a few sheets of iron roofing, buckled and contorted. A thin wisp of smoke coiled up from the ruin. "Jack!" I called. "Let's try the theatre," Sir Elkin suggested. "I left him there." We went in. The rostrum Jack used for his lectures was low, flat-topped and semicircular, with a high raised desk in the middle. Being isolated, it had escaped the fire; as maybe it had proved too cumbrous for removal.