628 LEAVES THEY HAVE TOUCHED. 



the large low dining-room, where preparations are being made for a 

 dinner-party, up a long passage lined with bookshelves, an open door- 

 way admits you to a room — large, certainly, but so choked with 

 contents that it rather reminds one of the inside of a disorderly 

 portmanteau. It is square, but for a bay-window in which stands a 

 library table piled with books and papers, an old black velvet sermon- 

 case, a battered travelling writing-case, and a desk with a ;wine-glass 

 of water on the ledge, and a tattered sheet of blotting-paper, on 

 which lies a bright blue book — " Artist and Craftsman "■ — the last 

 study of the owner of the room, to judge from the paper-cutter 

 between the leaves. It is flanked by " Lectures on Casuistry," and 

 " Geschichte des Alien Bund." A. portentous waste-paper basket 

 stands beneath ; both this and the paper-cutter seem fitted by their 

 unusual proportions to cope with their daily work. A hard horse-hair 

 chair, without arms, springs or cushions, turns its back resolutely to 

 the garden, and its face to the army of papers. Thi-ee tables and ^a 

 what-not dispersed over the room, serve as foundations for a pyramid 

 of books, reports, periodicals — Cornhills, Macmillans, Revues des 

 Deux Mondes, — thatched with the Times, Pcdl Mall, Saturday, 

 Guardian, and other papers unnumbered. Two wandering book- 

 cases, with double faces and no backs, are stacked with motley rows 

 of volumes, at which we will look closer. Saint Anselm de Canter- 

 bury, Artemus Ward, " Science d'Histoire," a long range of Dumas, 

 Comte's " Systeme," " Ingoldsby's Legends." Are the contents of 

 the shelves which line the walls less miscellaneous 1 Hardly less 

 surprising. Here is a favourite shelf apparently, where the books 

 stand loosely and unevenly, as if ready for immediate action — Lettish 

 Bible, Bihlj Swata, W^ndisk Bible, " Zwingli's Werke" (pushed in 

 hastily and upside down), a little Hindustani, and incomprehensible 

 " Jalowicz Polyglotte der Oriental Poesie," ^^ Rabhinische Blumenlese." 

 Nor, if you may not be surprised too far from the two modes of 

 escape — the door and the window — are the other shelves less bewil- 

 dering to a merely human understanding. Bopp, " Sanskitsprache," 

 f^ Koj^tische Grammatik," "Miverian Archaeology;" Ai'abic, Arme- 

 nian, Celtic, Persian Dictionaries ; Grammars of Icelandic, Erse, 

 jEgyptische, seventy-eight volumes of "Memoires relatives a I'Histoire 

 de France;" Dallas, the " G-ay Science." (What may that be^ 

 Whist ^ fencing "? dancing 1 Not at all — Criticism !) Dante, Shak- 

 speare, Bunsen, Milton, Hallam, Sevigne, Luther. But a complete 



