FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   >>  
eople there?" "Usual sort of number." "What did they look like?" Soames tried to visualize them. "They all," he presently remembered, "looked very like one another." My mind took a fearsome leap. "All dressed in sanitary woolen?" "Yes, I think so. Grayish-yellowish stuff." "A sort of uniform?" He nodded. "With a number on it perhaps--a number on a large disk of metal strapped round the left arm? D. K. F. 78,910--that sort of thing?" It was even so. "And all of them, men and women alike, looking very well cared for? Very Utopian, and smelling rather strongly of carbolic, and all of them quite hairless?" I was right every time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were hairless or shorn. "I hadn't time to look at them very closely," he explained. "No, of course not. But--" "They stared at ME, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of attention." At last he had done that! "I think I rather scared them. They moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about, at a distance, wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle seemed to have a sort of panic whenever I went to make inquiries." "What did you do when you arrived?" Well, he had gone straight to the catalogue, of course,--to the S volumes,--and had stood long before SN-SOF, unable to take this volume out of the shelf because his heart was beating so. At first, he said, he wasn't disappointed; he only thought there was some new arrangement. He went to the middle desk and asked where the catalogue of twentieth-century books was kept. He gathered that there was still only one catalogue. Again he looked up his name, stared at the three little pasted slips he had known so well. Then he went and sat down for a long time. "And then," he droned, "I looked up the 'Dictionary of National Biography,' and some encyclopedias. I went back to the middle desk and asked what was the best modern book on late nineteenth-century literature. They told me Mr. T. K. Nupton's book was considered the best. I looked it up in the catalogue and filled in a form for it. It was brought to me. My name wasn't in the index, but--yes!" he said with a sudden change of tone, "that's what I'd forgotten. Where's that bit of paper? Give it me back." I, too, had forgotten that cryptic screed. I found it fallen on the floor, and handed it to him. He smoothed it out, nodding and smiling at me disagreeably. "I found
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   >>  



Top keywords:

looked

 

catalogue

 

number

 
middle
 

hairless

 
stared
 

century

 

Soames

 

forgotten

 
gathered

unable

 

twentieth

 

disappointed

 

arrangement

 

thought

 

beating

 

volume

 
modern
 
change
 
sudden

smiling

 

smoothed

 
nodding
 

handed

 

cryptic

 

screed

 

fallen

 
brought
 

droned

 

Dictionary


National

 

Biography

 

encyclopedias

 

Nupton

 

disagreeably

 

considered

 

filled

 
nineteenth
 

literature

 
pasted

strapped

 

Utopian

 

smelling

 

strongly

 

nodded

 

uniform

 

remembered

 

presently

 

visualize

 

fearsome