“I mean I have got the page.”
“Well, say what you mean! Put your finger on the top left-hand corner.” (Moïse obeyed.) “More to the right!” (Moïse obeyed.) “There! You are touching the first three letters of the first word. Now find out!”
(Here followed a valiant effort by Moïse to puzzle it out, but as the type was so different from the writing he failed.)
“Does it mean ‘droit’?“ he asked.
“No! Ha! Ha! Ha!” (The glass was laughing.) “Write down a number.”
Moïse wrote down 473.
“Add 810 to it and look it up.” (Moïse took up the same dictionary.) “No, the other book!”
Moïse looked up page 1283 in the second dictionary and found a similar word.
“Does it mean this?” he asked, pointing to the word “South.”
“Yes, of course,” came the answer. “Now I will number the letters of the second word for you. Begin—1, 32.” (Moïse began looking up page 132.) “Foolish! Read what I said. That is the page. I am not numbering the page, but the letters of the alphabet.”