I have never in my life known anything more sparkling and stimulating than those half-hour intermissions. The old man always clapped on his hat, talking incessantly as usual, and, stretching his long legs to a stride which kept me trotting like a little dog at his side, started up the Boulevard St. Michel towards the Odéon, to the pastry-shop which calls itself “of the Medicis.” As soon as his tall form showed in the distance, and the inimitable, high, never-to-be-forgotten squeak of his voice could be heard, one of the elegant young-lady waitresses bestirred herself--for the pastry-shop was proud of its famous patron. She always had _babas au rhum_ waiting for us, as this was the only pastry Professor Meyer considered worth eating. I do not like _babas au rhum_ myself, but who was I to set up my insignificant opinion against so great a man? So I ate the wet sop docilely, considering it a small price to pay for the stories that went with it, stories that blew the walls away from around us, and spread there the rich darkness of the Middle Ages. There were stories out of medieval manuscripts as yet unattributed and unedited, heaped in the upper rooms of the Ambrosiana at Milan, of the untold riches, unclassified and unarranged of the Bodleian, which Paul Meyer described with apostolic fervor; of priceless scripts discovered in impossible places, by incredible coincidences; of years of fruitless work on an obscure passage in the Grail-cycle, suddenly cleared up because a Greek priest in Siberia had discovered a manuscript bound in with an old Bible. Or if he were in a playful mood, the mood the waitresses adored and hoped for, he would begin juggling with the names of things about us, the trim shoes on their feet, the brooches at their throats, the ribbon in their well-kept hair; and with a pyrotechnic display of laughing erudition, would hunt those words around and around through all the languages where they had tarried for a time, back through history--the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Late Latin, the Empire--till they ended in the long-drawn sonorous Sanscrit chant of an early Aryan dialect, which Professor Meyer rendered with a total disregard of onlookers. After one of these flights, we came to ourselves with a start, looking around with astonishment at our everyday dress and surroundings and bodies.