Max Beerbohm is a writer, who first met the struggling poet called Enoch Soames in a London cafe. Enoch decides to make a pact with the devil to travel 100 years into the future to spend the afternoon in the British Museum Reading Room and discover what posterity would say about him and his work. The price of this offer... eternity in Hell. 

The celebrated American Humarist, Mr Donald Ogden Stewart names this as his Favorite Story.