"A spot of Brightness "                            19

looked up a word in the Oxford Dictionary. The bag looked per¬
fectly harmless, but after she gave it to me she said, "There's a live
cat in there, so don't let it out of the bag." It was an ordinary bag,
too, with a draw-string top, and the cat was not accepting the
situation philosophically.

Found! (in the Eleventh Volume)

A most frequent and most stimulating asker of questions for
many years was President Nicholas .Murray Butler, who, in the
course of the enormous amount of speaking and writing which he
did, on many occasions felt it necessary to verify or check some
passage or reference. For thirty years it was an invariable rule in
the Reference Department that any quotation question asked by
the President must be an.swered no matter what time was taken
or what methods had to be followed. An inquiry about a quotation
from some speech or work of Edmund Burke called for the use
of a technic which fortunately does not have to be resorted to too
often and which for obvious reasons could not be used for anyone
less important than the President of the University. Dr. Butler had
the quotation, in what, as far as one could judge merely from the
surface, appeared to be a correct form, but his well-known atti¬
tude towards exactness of quotation meant that the Reference
Department must check it word for word. Unfortunately, no set
of Burke's works has an index nor is there any separate dictionary
or index to him as a writer or statesman, and his writings were
voluminous. The only possible approach, if this question was to
be answered on our own standard of service, was to read Burke
from beginning to end, and a twelve volume set of his works,
which seemed to be complete, was selected. As there were then
four members of the Reference Department, this divided evenly
into three volumes each—and the Reference Department under¬
took to read Burke. The quotation was located in the eleventh