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148 carried away from his room an old chest, and removed his shirts and stockings from the bureau for the laundress, he was inconsolable when he returned, declaring that he had lost his whole Assyrian History, and that all his proofs of the immortality of the soul, which he had arranged so systematically in the drawers, were gone to the wash!

Among the originals whom I learned to know in Leyden belongs Mynheer van Bissen, a cousin of Van Moeulen, who introduced him to me. He was professor of theology at the university, and I attended his lectures on the Canticles of Solomon and the Apocalypse of St. John. He was a fine, flourishing, florid man, perhaps of fifty-five, and in his chair was very staid and serious. But once when I called on him and found no one in his study, I saw through the half-opened door of a side-room a very strange sight. This cabinet was furnished in a half-Chinese, half-Pompadour style, with shot-gold damask hangings on the wall, on the ground the most costly Persian carpet,