haired man, so thin and so very angry!

"Clumsy idiot! To blot an Early Text!"

I leaned over and looked. Upon the page of folio, close to an
illuminated capital, the black drop had flattened itself. Around the
original sphere had been shed splashes of all conceivable shapes-rays,
rockets, dotted lines, arrowheads, all the freakish impromptu of chaos.
Next, the slope lending its aid, the channels had drained into one, and
by this time a black rivulet was crawling downward to the margin. One or
two readers near had risen, and now eyed me like examining magistrates.
I waited for an outbreak, motionless, dazed, muttering words that did not
mend the case at all. "What a pity! Oh, I'm so sorry! If I had only
known--" The student of the Early Text stood motionless as I. Together
we watched the ink trickle. Suddenly, summoning his wits together, he
burrowed with feverish haste in his morocco writing-case, pulled out a
sheet of blotting-paper, and began to soak up the ink with the
carefulness of a Sister of Mercy stanching a wound. I seized the
opportunity to withdraw discreetly to the third row of tables, where the
attendant had just deposited my books. Fear is so unreasoning. Very
likely by saying no more about it, by making off and hiding my head in my
hands, like a man crushed by the weight of his remorse, I might disarm
this wrath. I tried to think so. But I knew well enough that there was
more to come. I had hardly taken my seat when, looking up, I could see
between my fingers the little man standing up and gesticulating beside
one of the keepers. At one moment he rapped the damning page with his
forefinger; the next, he turned sidewise and flung out a hand toward me;
and I divined, without hearing a word, all the bitterness of his
invective. The keeper appeared to take it seriously. I felt myself
blushing. "There must be," thought I, "some law against ink-stains, some