ABSTRACT
A workshop was set up for William in a disused saddle-room, next to the stables. This was half-full of the tin boxes, the wooden crates, the teachests of things Harald had purchased - apparently with no clear priority of interest - from all over the world. Here were monkey skins and delicate parrot skins, preserved lizards and monstrous snakes, box upon box of dead beetles, brilliant green, iridescent purple, swarthy demons with monstrous horned heads. Here too were crates of geological specimens, and packs of varied mosses, fruits and flowers, from the Tropics and the ice-caps, bears' teeth and rhinoceros horns, the · skeletons of sharks and clumps of coral. Some packages proved to have been reduced to drifting dust by the action of termites, or compacted to viscous dough by the operation of mould. William asked his benefactor on what principIe he was required to proceed, and Harald told hirn, 'Set it all in order, don't you know? Make sense of it, lay it all out in some order or other. ' William came to see that Harald had not carried out this task hirnself partly at least because he had no real idea of how to set about it. He feit moments of real irritability that treasures for which men like hirnself had risked life and health should lie here higgledy-piggledy, and decay in an English stable. He procured a trestle-table and severalledgers, aseries of collecting cabinets and so me cupboards for specimens that would not lie flat and slide conveniently in and out of drawers. He set up his microscope, and began to make labels. He moved things from day to day from drawer to drawer as he found hirnself with a plethora of beetles or a sudden plague of frogs. He could not devise an organising principle, but went on doggedly making labels, setting up, examining.
