I am writing in haste. In half an hour, Mr Torrington will pick me up and we will set off for somewhere called Crowndale Road, where the Prince of Wales will officially lay the first foundation stone of the new building of the Working Men's College.

Mr Torrington, my College colleague, is by occupation a cobbler. The moment he meets you, he takes a sheet of paper out of his side pocket, hands it to you and asks you to ‘take note’. The sheet is covered with drawings of all kinds of shoes which Mr Torrington makes very deftly ‘for the lowest prices’ in his dark workshop.

But if you were to look into this side pocket of Mr Torrington’s, you would see to your amazement, next to the drawings of shoes, Haeckel's ‘The Riddle of the Universe’, or Clodd's ‘Pioneers of Evolution’, or Stephen's ‘An Agnostic's Apology’ – in short, something that in no way resembles shoes.

Upon further acquaintance, your astonishment would continue to grow.

Your interlocutor can, on occasion, freely quote from Voltaire, Goethe and Calderón in their native tongues… He likes to reinforce his conten-tions in debates with expressions like: ‘Huxley told me’, or ‘I heard that from William Morris’, or ‘The late Ruskin would often point out to me’, and so on.

But your amazement would be fated to grow even more if you were to come into our College ‘coffee room’ and see at once several dozen such Torringtons, hear similar speeches and receive similar price lists, where you would be asked to ‘take note’ of the tailoring, joining, or bookbinding talents of your new acquaintances.

You are a newcomer. You have just paid two or three shillings at the office and registered as a student of civil law, or sacred history, or the Italian language. You have been issued with a card which tells you that you have been made a member of the College club and granted the right to borrow books from the College library. You go to the ‘coffee room’ and ask one of your new colleagues to show you the library. The colleague leaves his game of chess, puts on his coat and willingly climbs with you to the first floor. You are in the library.