After having examined and re-examined the fragment, he announced his intention of sending the clerk on a second errand--still without troubling himself to explain what his incomprehensible instructions meant.
"If I am not mistaken," he began, "the Reading Rooms, in our town, open as early as nine.

Very well.

Go to the Rooms this morning, on the stroke of the clock." He stopped, and consulted the letter which lay open on his bed.

"Ask the librarian," he continued, "for the third volume of Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' Open the book at pages seventy-eight and seventy-nine.

If you find a piece of paper between those two leaves, take possession of it when nobody is looking at you, and bring it to me.