Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/327

Rh shelves according to his ever-changing systems. One day he would place the books according to their subjects, the next he would order them all about and have them line up according to their heights or to the colours of their bindings and, on the following day, he would judge them according to their thickness. As he was captured and recaptured in different towns and had served his sentences in various places, he knew the libraries of several institutions and had rearranged all of them. He was everywhere well known and liked for his amiable, quiet disposition, for his serviceableness and for his good character. He wrote the prisoners' letters, completed his own memoirs, and, in addition, composed love-sonnets and a tragedy in ten acts, which was destined to outshine Shakespeare. The authorities always looked upon him with a feeling of real sympathy and respect; and when he returned, after one escape, in the custody of soldiers and police, the keepers would smile a friendly welcome and say to him:

"Again you have come to pay us a visit, Mr. Shutkoff! Without you the library has fallen into sad disorder."

"Oh, Lord!" the Librarian would sigh with a show of importance and, as soon as he was duly enrolled in the prison office, go right off to begin his literary work.

He knew a mass of titles of books and had a quantity of notions of various sciences terribly jumbled together. He was very proud of all his learning, going so far at times as to air theories of his own creation, which were unique and preposterous. But he never quarrelled and, when he met anyone more learned than himself, he simply went away as though offended and always thereafter avoided him.

I knew from time to time several of these librarians and looked upon them as monomaniacs produced by the