Let it be added that Professor de Bohun had acquired, from so much concentrated study upon dodekahedral crystals--with fatiguing excursions among the octohedrals--a pleasing habit of repeating a word, never less than three times, and sometimes six or eight. In dress the old gentleman was careless, and, though perpetually washing, never apparently clean. However, he did shave--save for the whiskers which were the badge of his attainments in the learned world. There was expected a third man, as young as, or younger than, Lord Galton, and of a very different and meaner kind, a certain Hamish McTaggart, who had become suddenly famous within the narrow circle of the people in the know, because the Prime Minister, upon reading an article of his upon Protection had said--in the full hearing of the very narrow circle--"This is the only man on Protection whom I really understand." The article had appeared by the order of McTaggart's master in _The Howl_, whence it may be rightly assumed that McTaggart knew no more of economics than would a warthog of Botticelli. Hence the lucid style which the Prime Minister had saluted with such discovering joy. His argument had been very simple. If you prevent things coming in to the sacred Island, Albion, the Albionese will have to make these things for themselves, and that means more employment, doesn't it? The truth had struck the Prime Minister with far more effect thus set down in clean print, than when he had heard it, as he had heard it a thousand times, from the proprietor of _The Howl_, whom he had himself so rightly ennobled. Therefore was Hamish McTaggart now glowing with a vivid, though, alas! restricted fame. He himself was getting heartily tired of it. It had halved his income--that is, it had brought it down below five hundred pounds a year. No one would print him except upon the subject of Protection, and he had to write in the way that was really understood. And he was allowed to write only in those papers peculiar to the little inner circle with the little inner circulation corresponding--and there's no money in that! When he wanted to write about tigers, and get his expenses paid free to the East and a lump sum--a job he would have got for the asking two years before, when he wrote by the thousand words, to order, just after leaving the University--he was asked what on earth he knew about it? Tigers! And was bundled back to Protection.