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not indeed a questionable, practice. Ten students, selected by the most strenuous preliminary tests, would, provided they remained together, achieve far more than they could do when permitted to mingle with a hundred beer-swilling dullards, the general run of university students. His doubts were therefore of the most serious and fundamental nature. He could only request the faculty to withdraw an offer which, although intended no doubt to show the high esteem in which they held him, was not one which he could accept in that spirit.
    At scholastic conferences, where there is usually a great deal of talk, Kien was a much-discussed personality. The learned gentlemen, who for the greater part of their lives were silent, timid and myopic mice, on these occasions, every two years or so, came right out of themselves; they welcomed each other, stuck the most inapposite heads together, whispered nonsense in corners and toasted each other clumsily at the dinner table. Deeply moved and profoundly gratified, they raised aloft the banner of learning and upheld the integrity of their aims. Over and over again in all languages they repeated their vows. They would have kept them even without taking them. In the intervals they made bets. Would Kien really come this time? He was more spoken of than a merely famous colleague; his behaviour excited curiosity. But he would not trade on his fame; for the last ten years he had stubbornly refused invitations to banquets and congresses where, in spite of his youth, he would have been warmly acclaimed; he announced for every conference an important paper, which was then read for him from his own manuscript by another scholar: all this his colleagues regarded as mere postponement. The time would come — perhaps this was the time — when he would suddenly make his appearance, would graciously accept the applause which his long retirement had made only the more vociferous, and would permit himself to be acclaimed president of the assembly, an office which was only his due, and which indeed he arrogated to himself after his own fashion even by his absence. But his learned colleagues were mistaken. Kien did not appear. The more credulous of them lost their bets.
    At the last minute he refused. Sending the paper he had written to a privileged person, he would add some ironical expressions of regret. In the event of his colleagues finding time for serious study in the intervals of a programme so rich in entertainment — an eventuality which in the interests of their general satisfaction he could hardly desire — he asked leave to lay before the conference this small contribution to knowledge, the result of two years' work. He would carefully save up any new and surprising conclusions to which his researches might hâve brought him for moments such as these. Their effects and the discussions to which they gave rise, he would follow from a distance, suspiciously and in detail, as though probing their textual accuracy. The gatherings were ready enough to accept his contempt. Eighty out of every hundred present relied entirely on his judgment. His services to science were inestimable. Long might he live. To most of them indeed his death would have been a severe shock.
    Those few who had known him in his earlier years had forgotten what his face was like. Repeatedly he received letters asking for his photograph. He had none, he would answer, nor did he intend to nave one taken. Both statements were true. But he had willingly agreed to a different sort of concession. As a young man of thirty he had, without however making any other testamentary dispositions, bequeathed his skull with all its contents to an institute for cranial research. He justified this step by considering the advantage to be gained if it could be scientifically proved that his truly phenomenal memory was the result of a particular structure, or perhaps even a heavier weight, of brain. Not indeed that he considered — so he wrote to the