FROM THE LIFE
almost at a glance. The clerk, piqued, brought another next day. It was more difficult, but Murdock unraveled it quickly enough. All the clerks joined in the game, and Murdock began to buy puzzles in order to study them secretly in his rooms so as to be ready if the clerks produced them. It developed into a hobby with him. He became so expert that the whole staff gossiped about it. One day the office manager, having watched him do a Chinese puzzle that was supposed to be practically insoluble, said: "Well, I know one puzzle you'll never find an answer to. I'll bring it to you." And next morning he arrived with a book called The Sphinx's Riddle and laid it on Murdock's desk.
It was a volume from a popular-science series that stated, in a simple way, the mystery of the origin of life in terms of evolution. It gave Benjamin McNeil Murdock his start. Scientific books began to take the place of puzzles on his bureau. In a few months he was buying bookcases. He carried books to his office and read at his luncheon. He read till all hours of the night. Even on his Sunday walking-trips up the Hudson he carried a volume in his pocket and read under the trees. And between walking miles to his work every morning and miles back at night, and reading insatiably whenever he was not asleep, his time out of office hours was so occupied that during all those years in New York he never entered a thea-
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