nearly placed me on a level with my preceptor. We decidedly created a sensation in the office. The "admitted" clerks and the articled clerks, whom legal etiquette forbids as a rule to fraternize with the "unadmitted," took a naïve and unaffected pleasure in our society. One day I was examining five enormous folios full-bound in yellow calf, in the clients' waiting-room, when the senior partner surprised me thus wasting the firm's time. "What's all this?" he inquired politely. He was far too polite to remonstrate. "This, sir? Bayle's 'Dictionaire Historique et Critique,'" I replied. "Is it yours?" "Yes, sir. I bought it in the lunch-hour at Hodgson's." "Ah!" He retired abashed. He was a gentle fellow, and professed an admiration for Browning; but the chief thing of which he had the right to be proud was his absolutely beautiful French accent. I had scarcely been in London a year when my friend and I decided to collaborate in a bibliographical dictionary of rare and expensive books in all European languages. Such a scheme sounds farcical, but we were perfectly serious over it; and the proof of our seriousness is that we worked at it every morning before breakfast. I may mention also that we lunched daily at the British Museum, much to the detriment of our official duties. For months we must have been quite mad--obsessed. We got about as far as the New English Dictionary travelled in the first twenty years of its life, that is to say, two-thirds through A; and then suddenly, irrationally, without warning, we dropped it. The mere conception of this dictionary was so splendid that there was a grandeur even in dropping it. Soon after this, the managing clerk of the office, a university man, autocratic, but kindly and sagacious, bought a country practice and left us. He called me into his room to say good-bye. "You'd no business to be here," he said, sharply. "You ought to be doing something else. If I find you here when I visit town next, I shall look on you as a d----d fool. Don't forget what I say."