very well, but who is ever going to read Tostatus Abulensis, or Pineda on Job, or a book like this?” He picked out a small quarto, loose in the binding, and from which the lettered label had fallen off'; and observing that coffee was waiting for him, retired to a chair. Eventually he opened the book. It will be observed that his condemnation of it rested wholly on external grounds. For all he knew it might have been a collection of unique plays, but undeniably the outside was blank and forbidding. As a matter of fact, it was a collection of sermons or meditations, and mutilated at that, for the first sheet was gone. It seemed to belong to the latter end of the seventeenth century. He turned over the pages till his eye was caught by a marginal note: “A Parable of this Unhappy Condition,” and he thought he would see what aptitudes the author might have for imaginative composition. “I have heard or read,” so ran the passage, “whether in the way of Parable or true Relation I leave my Reader to judge, of a Man who, like Theseus, in the
