The opportunity of voyaging to England, which I had so long looked forward to, did not come to me until the Spring of the present year, and the pleasant anticipations with which I set out were comparable in my own mind with those which must have animated the Knights of Arthur’s Round Table in their quest for the holy grail. The morning after my arrival in London found me an early visitor at the British Museum. The preliminaries of admittance to the Reading-Room are not difficult, and are soon over with, and I found myself within the great rotunda, its walls lined in tiers with what is best in the literatures of the world, and from which has gone out so much that is worth while in English literature. From the Catalogue I filled out slips for some half dozen works, artfully to conceal the one uppermost in my mind, handed them in at the desk, and returned to my chosen seat to await with such calmness as I could command the culmination of years of desire. Heeding the legend that when the grail was approached by any one not perfectly pure it vanished from sight; and that to be qualified to discover it one must be perfectly chaste in thought and act, I endeavored to prepare myself for its appearance. Somewhere I have read of an Oriental visionary who attained a high degree of saintly perfection by fixing his gaze steadfastly for hours upon his navel, which a growing embonpoint made an easy thing to do, and I sought for holiness in the same way. In time the white slips of my wants came fluttering back to me by messengers, all marked, very properly for security on account of rarity, that they could only be consulted in the North Library, until all were in but the one most desired. Then followed a much longer wait and then—the slip was handed back to me with a notation that I had given a wrong shelf-mark! Gone in an instant were all the perfectly pure and chaste thoughts with which I had been regaling myself while I was apparently looking at the wrong button on my vest. I think I could have stood the blow better if it had been that hoary old fiction of careless assistants that it was “out”, but this is a boon denied to any assistant in the British Museum, where nothing is allowed to go out. A comparison with the printed Catalogue showed an exact correspondence, and I sought the Superintendent of the Reading-Room, who assured me that the matter would have his personal attention; and for the rest of the day I busied myself with my other wants in the North Library without any word of the missing broadside reaching me. That evening, in communion with myself, I determined to throw off the mask of secrecy and frankly confide the importance of my quest to the Keeper of the Printed Books—the somewhat expressive and imposing title of the Librarian of the British Museum.