CHAPTER XXXII.
During all this time my museum made great progress, and it soon became necessary for me to have some new shelves put up.
My great uncle continued to take a very deep interest in my taste for natural history, and among his shells he found a number of duplicates, and these he presented to me.

With indefatigable patience he taught me the scientific classifications of Cuvier, Linne, Lamarck or Bruguieres, and I was astonished at the attention with which I listened to him.
In a very old little desk, that was a part of the furniture of my museum, I had a copy-book into which I copied, from uncle's notes, and numbered with the greatest care, the name of the species, genus, family and class of each shell,--also the place of its origin.

And there by the dim light that fell upon the desk, in the silence of that little retreat so high above the street, surrounded with objects what had come from distant corners of the earth and from the depths of the sea, when my mind wandered, and I became fatigued because of the mysterious differences in the forms of animals, and because of the infinite variety of shells, with what emotion I wrote down in my book, opposite the name of a Spirifer or a Terebratula, such enchanting words as these: "Eastern coast of Africa," "coast of Guinea," "Indian Ocean." I recall that in this same museum I experienced, one afternoon in March, a peculiar feeling indicative of my tendency towards reaction, that later, at certain periods of self-abandonment, caused me to seek the rough and uncouth society of sailors, and made me revel in noise and change and gayety.
It was Mardi-Gras time.

At sundown I had gone out with my father to see the masqueraders who were in the streets; and having returned rather early I went immediately to my attic-room to classify some shells.

But the noise of the revellers and the clashing of their tambourines reached even to the retreat where I was occupying myself with scientific matters, and the sounds awakened in me a feeling of inexpressible sadness.