The man I saw wrote with a thing like a fountain pen, a modern touch
that prohibited any historical retrospection, and as he finished
each sheet, writing in an easy flowing hand, he added it to a growing
pile upon a graceful little table under the window. His last done
sheets lay loose, partly covering others that were clipped together
into fascicles.

Clearly he was unaware of my presence, and I stood waiting until
his pen should come to a pause. Old as he certainly was
he wrote with a steady hand. . . .

I discovered that a concave speculum hung slantingly high over his
head; a movement in this caught my attention sharply, and I looked
up to see, distorted and made fantastic but bright and beautifully
colored, the magnified, reflected, evasive rendering of a palace,
of a terrace, of the vista of a great roadway with many people,
people exaggerated, impossible-looking because of the curvature of
the mirror, going to and fro. I turned my head quickly that I might
see more clearly through the window behind me, but it was too high
for me to survey this nearer scene directly, and after a momentary
pause I came back to that distorting mirror again.

But now the writer was leaning back in his chair. He put down his
pen and sighed the half resentful sigh--"ah! you, work, you! how
you gratify and tire me!"--of a man who has been writing to his
satisfaction.

"What is this place," I asked, "and who are you?"

He looked around with the quick movement of surprise.