Nine Acres of Glass — hints

Read the board. schedule, then ledger. The board says the North Transept, the South Transept and the Printing Room go on Saturday night, and the ledger says there is something of yours in all three.

Six days. Walking somewhere and signing an entry off cost time; reading, looking and talking are free. That means you can talk to everybody and examine everything and it costs you nothing — what costs you is where you walk.

claim the ferns, standing next to them. The crating gang is never thirty feet away and it goes on the Returns cart instead of the Sydenham one.

Go there first — it is next to the south door and it comes down on Saturday. read the proofs. It tells you the one thing about entry 1140 that exists nowhere else in England.

With a date from the proofs you can look up the waybill in the office: read the waybills. And ask Mr Rispin in the crossing about the case, and about the clerk, and listen to what he does not know he is telling you.

The North Gallery on Thursday — in the middle of the week, not at the end — and the South Gallery on Saturday night. There is a lifeboat in one and a case of surgical instruments in the other.

North Gallery, and only if you have read the Class 30 proofs, because otherwise you do not know which class to look in. read the jury minutes.

Yes, and when you have all four the game says so, and after that entry 1140 has a name on it and can be signed for.

There is not any. Look at the ledger, look at the board, and go to the thing that is going soonest.

Twelve working actions and three courts closing: Machinery on Wednesday, the Colonial Court on Friday, and the Sculpture Court and the whole east end on Saturday night.

claim 1140 in the Sculpture Court. It will not let you unless you have traced it — the card wants an address, and that has been the whole difficulty since last October. Signing for it puts it in the Returns shed on hold, out of the Sydenham stream.

The wool bale in the west nave. It stands until the end of week four and it is the only entry in the ledger you can safely put off.

Then it is in the yard in a crate under its mark, and Mallow will get two out and not twenty, and that is next week.

Go to the crate rows and hunt for HAB — the mark, off your own ledger, not a description. Nan Prew will have it in four minutes from a mark and cannot help you at all from a description.

Two. Mallow said two in July and he says it again, and the nine hundred crates nearest the road go on Thursday, so do it early.

It is in the Returns shed. Take a bar from the cart at the loading ground and pry the case. Twenty-two brass screws and forty minutes.

A working model of a self-acting brake for a colliery winding engine, and a date cut into the oak of the frame with a chisel before it was ever crated.

Ask Bewley about 1140 and about the medal. Ask Rispin about Sydenham. Ask Nan about the rows, and about the chair.

Board floor, three elms, a stone ring full of rain, ten staircases going up to nothing, and the columns.

Go to the Returns shed and type options. Four things may be done about entry 1140 and none of them is the right one.

post the model — back to Darlington with the Commission’s form of words. post the model and the papers — the waybill, the jury minute, and a letter naming the clerk who turned him away, which was you. enter the truth in the ledger — nine hundred words, signed, filed, and never read. close it as unclaimed — Form R4, nine words, used four hundred and six times this year.

None of them. Ask Mr Bewley about 1140 and about the form before you choose — he has known since the second of August and has written nothing down, and he will tell you he is not telling you what to do.