The Department was a large, long room with a cubby-hole at its further end for the accommodation of the senior clerk, a sort of school prefect who had to keep order among the high-spirited juniors and therefore required to work a little apart from them. When Brentham entered the main room, announced by the office messenger, he recognized two friends of yore and several new, ingenuous faces. There also emerged from the cubby hole a man whom he had known as a junior three years previously: an agreeable gentleman of agricultural and sporting tastes, who, because of his occasional remonstrances and enforcement of discipline, was known as "Snarley Yow or the Dog Fiend." Then there were "Rosie" Walrond and Ted Parsons. (The others do not matter in this narrative: they merely served as chorus and acclaimers of the witticisms of the elder boys. They were all nice to look at, all well-mannered and all well-dressed.) "Rosie" Walrond was a young man—older than he looked—with wavy flaxen hair and mocking grey eyes, and an extremely cynical manner overlying an exceedingly kind heart.
Walrond: "Hullo! Here's Brentham, the rescuer of beleaguered Gospellers. We've got a grudge against you. You came here months ago and were closeted with Spavins and never gave us a look-in. And we were dying to hear all about the elopement and its sequel. We were prepared to subscribe to a wedding present for a teller of good stories...."
Then he added: "D'you admire my grotto?"
Brentham, after the necessary greetings and introductions, strode up to "Rosie's" desk. Its ledges and escarpments were piled with rock specimens on which tattered, brown, and half-decipherable labels had been pasted.
"My mineral specimens ... from" (he checked himself) ... "from East Africa! Then you never sent them on?"
"My dear chap! Where was I to send them to? The Consular Mail bags—two of them—arrived here all right, addressed to me, but nary a letter with them or any directions. Also two skulls which, as you see, decorate our mantelpiece, and which I am proposing to have mounted in silver at Snarley's expense for our Departmental Dinner. Meantime, I have arranged my desk as a grotto, in spite of the office cleaner's objections...."
Brentham: "I suppose the letter of directions went astray. I asked you to send the rocks to the School of Mines and the skulls to the Natural History Museum. However, I'll take them all away presently in a cab."
"But not the skulls, I beg, just as we were being initiated into Devil worship by Snarley, who has learnt the Black Mass...."
"Yes, the skulls, too. They're most important——"
"But so are we," said Parsons.