I opened the yellow-stained pages and savoured their acrid musty smell.

How much learning, thought I, bought with the heart's-blood, how many million hours of fierce intellectual struggle appeal to mankind nowadays but as an odour, an odour of decay, in the nostrils of here and there a casual student.

I thought this, and my eye caught, repeated many times, the name of the Frangipani, once lords of Segna.

As men, their achievements are wiped out of commonly remembered history; but their name is distilled into a sensuous perfume which perchance may be found in the penny scent fountains of to-day.

I was smiling over this quaint olfactory coincidence, and wondering whether any human being alive at that moment had ever read the Sieur Houssaie's book, when a tug at my arm, such as a neglected terrier gives with his paw, brought me back to the workaday world.