My next example is from a miniature in a volume of Hours known as the Dunois _Horae_, also written in the middle of the fifteenth century. It has been slightly enlarged in order to bring out the details more clearly. The subject is S. Luke writing his Gospel, but the background represents a scholar's room. There is a bookcase of a very modern type, a table with two folio volumes lying upon it, and in the centre a hexagonal book-desk, with a little Gothic turret as in the last example. Round the screw under the table are four cylindrical supports, the use of which I fail to understand, but they occur frequently on desks of this type. The whole piece of furniture rests on a heavy cylindrical base, and that again on a square platform. I now pass to a variety of the screw-desk, which has a small book-rest above the table. The whole structure rests upon a prolongation of the solid platform on which the reader's chair is placed, so that it is really exactly in front of the reader. My illustration (fig. 143) is from "The booke of the noble ladyes in frensh," a work by Boccacio; it was written in France early in the fifteenth century[533]. [Illustration: Fig. 144. Screw-desk. From a fifteenth century MS. in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal, Paris.] [Illustration: Fig. 145. Hexagonal desk, with central spike, probably for a candle. From a French MS. of _Le Miroir Historial_.] These double desks are exceedingly common, and I might fill a large number of pages with figures and descriptions of the variety which the ingenuity of the cabinet-makers of the fifteenth century managed to impart to combinations of a screw and two or more tables. I will content myself with one more example (fig. 144) which shews the screw exceedingly well, and the two tables above it. The uppermost of these serves as a ledge to rest the books on, as does also the hexagonal block above it which conceals the top of the screw[534]. We meet occasionally with a solid desk, by which I mean one the level of which cannot be altered. In the example here given (fig. 145) from a French MS. of _Le Miroir Historial_, there is a central spike which I suspect to have been intended to carry a candle[535].