In a large Bloomsbury studio he found a retreat suitable to his requirements. The uninviting entrance, up a stone staircase leading immediately from the street, was open till nightfall, the rest of the house being used for storage by second-hand dealers in Portland Street. No one slept on the premises, but a caretaker came at stated intervals to light fires and close the front door; for which, however, the Professor owned a pass-key, each room having, as in modern flats, an independent door that might be locked at pleasure. The general gloom of the building never tempted casual callers. The Professor purposely abstained from the decoration or even ordinary furnishing of his chamber. The whitewashed walls were covered with dust-bitten maps, casts of bas-reliefs, engravings of ruins. Behind the door were stacked huge packing-cases containing the harvest of a recent journey to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Along one wall mutilated statues and torsos were promiscuously mounted on trestles or temporary pedestals made of inverted wooden boxes. Above them a large series of shelves bulging with folios, manuscript notebooks, pamphlets, and catalogues ran up to the window, which faced north-east, admitting a strong top-light through panes of ground glass; the lower sash was hidden by permanent blinds in order to shut out all view of the opposite houses and the street below. A long narrow table occupied the centre of the room. It was always strewn with magnifying-glasses, proofs, printers' slips, negatives--the litter of a palaeographic student. There were three or four wooden chairs for the benefit of scholarly friends, and an armchair upholstered in green rep near the stove. In a corner stood the most striking, perhaps the only striking, object in the room--a huge mummy from the Fayyum. The canopic jars and outer coffins belonging to it were still unpacked in the freight cases. It had been purchased from a bankrupt Armenian dealer in Cairo along with a number of Graeco-Egyptian antiquities and papyri, of far greater interest to the Professor than the mummy itself. As soon as the interior was examined it was to be presented to the Museum; but more entertaining and important studies delayed its removal. For many months, with a curious grave smile, the face on the shell seemed to look down with amused and permanent interest on Professor Lachsyrma struggling with the orthography of some forgotten scribe, and arguing with a friend on mutilated or corrupt passages in a Greek palimpsest.