ave occupied in London. The silent, discreet
ministrations of his servants charmed him, exhausted as he was at the
thought of the loud loquacity of hotel attendants. The methodical
organization of his life made him feel that it was especially to be
envied since the possibility of traveling had become imminent.

He steeped himself in this bath of habitude, to which artificial
regrets insinuated a tonic quality.

But his books chiefly preoccupied him. He examined them, re-arranged
them on the shelves, anxious to learn if the hot weather and the rains
had damaged the bindings and injured the rare paper.

He began by moving all his Latin books; then he arranged in a new
order the special works of Archelaus, Albert le Grand, Lully and
Arnaud de Villanova treating of cabbala and the occult sciences;
finally he examined his modern books, one by one, and was happy to
perceive that all had remained intact.

This collection had cost him a considerable sum of money. He would not
suffer, in his library, the books he loved to resemble other similar
volumes, printed on cotton paper with the watermarks of _Auvergne_.

Formerly in Paris he had ordered made, for himself alone, certain
volumes which specially engaged mechanics printed from hand presses.
Sometimes, he applied to Perrin of Lyons, whose graceful, clear type
was suitable for archaic reprints of old books. At other times he
dispatched orders to England or to America for the execution of modern
literature and the works of the present century. Still again, he
applied to a house in Lille, which for centuries had possessed a
complete set of Gothic characters; he also would send requisitions to
the old Enschede printing house of Haarlem whose foundry still has the
stamps and dies of certain antique letters.

He had followed the same method in selecting his papers. Finally
growing weary of the snowy Chinese and the nacreous and gilded
Japanese papers, the white Whatmans, the brown Hollands, the
buff-colored Turkeys and Seychal Mills, and equally disgusted with all
mechanically manufactured sheets, he had ordered special laid paper in
the mould, from the old plants of Vire which still employ the pestles
once in use to grind hemp. To introduce a certain variety into his
collection, he had repeatedly brought from London prepared stuffs,
paper interwoven with hairs, and as a mark of his disdain for
bibliophiles, he had a Lubeck merchant prepare for him an improved
candle paper o