inspected it, leaving it afterwards in just the position in which she had found it. As she turned from it she gave a cry of surprise; a chair stood in the corner, half hidden by the press, and across the back of it hung a long lock of hair, brown and silky, now fluttering in the unaccustomed draught from the open panel. Suddenly the intruder was aware that the walls were covered with books but they were hidden behind a close, thin green wire netting, which had at first looked like the pattern of the wall. She eagerly called for a chair to stand on to examine them; the landlord handed her one through the door, and then for the first time, fascinated yet afraid, gazed into the room. Many were the voluble and simple exclamations he uttered; but he was evidently more concerned as to the risk of touching such uncanny things than pleased at the discovery of the energetic stranger. Meanwhile, she looked at the books, which filled up two sides of the room from floor to ceiling—they were a treasure, as she knew: old Italian and German books on theological and philosophical subjects; translations into Italian of some Elizabethan authors—these, perhaps, unique of their kind, and rarer than originals in either English or Italian; Italian translations of more modern English books; poetry, science, illuminated manuscripts, first editions of sixteenth-century printed books—the Italian ones, even those in black-letter, perfectly clear and legible to a tyro, while a few English books of a century later were not half so decipherable; a good many Greek and Latin books, but not so many as of the Italian and German; and a few Oriental manuscripts, chiefly Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac. In two places on the wall, which showed traces of a rough kind of painting as a background, were hung unframed Chinese landscapes on wood, and in other parts of the room old engravings, some plainly framed, some not, but pasted on to boards, and one or two unfinished etchings. The most interesting purported to be a head of St. Peter—not a conventional one, but a copy from some old painting, itself copied from a Byzantine fresco, and claiming to be—so said the quotation at the foot of the etching—a portrait of the apostle as he really was. The pedigree of the portrait, however, was the really interesting point, and this was minutely traced in the foot-note, added by one signing himself Andrea C., to the unfinished etching of the artist, who, it seems, had died while engaged on this work.