"Try it on this," said the agent, handing me Conan Doyle's "Round the Fire Stories."
I put on an interest gauge and read the tale of "The Lost Special." The arrow shot up to 98 before I had half finished the yarn.
"The highest that the gauge will record, you see, is 140, though we guarantee them to stand a pressure of 165. They are not often subjected to anything like that. The average novel or short story to-day does not put them under a very severe strain. The greatest risk we run is from authors reading their own books. We had an especially dangerous case the other day, during some tests in the laboratory. We had a young author reading the proofs of his first book, and we put on a high pressure scale, capable of recording up to 210, and even then we took off the gauge only just in time. It had reached the limit, and there were danger signs."
"What are danger signs?" I asked.
"The liquid begins to boil," he said, "and then you have to look out for trouble. Now how many of these will you take? I can let you have a trial dozen for $4, or two dozen for $7.50. Two dozen? Thank you. You attach them in the back of the book—so fashion—or if the book is bound with a loose back, then you put them down here. There is no danger of their being seen, in either case. Here is our card, we shall be very pleased to fill any further orders. Thank you. Good day!"
As soon as he had gone I left my office, and went out into the public part of the library. I had started for the reading-room, when I heard my name called. It was Professor Frugles, the well-known scientific historian. He is giving his course of lectures on "The Constitutional Development of Schleswig-Holstein" and I had attended one or two of them. They had already been going on for two months—and although he lectured four times a week, he hadn't progressed beyond the introduction and preliminaries. Both of the lectures I had heard were long wrangles in which the professor devoted his energies to proving that some writer on this subject (a German whose name I did not catch) was wholly untrustworthy. I was told by some of the most patient listeners that so far no single thing about Schleswig-Holstein itself had been mentioned, and that it did not appear to be in sight. The course consisted merely of Frugles' opinions of the authorities.
Now the professor came slowly toward me, wiping his face with a large red handkerchief and waving his cane.
"Got any new books?" he shouted.
I told him we had a few, and took him back into one of the workrooms. He examined them.
"This will do; I'll look this over," and he picked up something in German.