But perhaps those years were not so wasted as they
seem to have been. Not only Functions of a Quaternion,
but other of these books, chatty books about hydro-mechanics
and dynamics of a particle (no, not an article—that
might have been helpful—a particle), gossipy
books about optics and differential equations, many
of these have a comforting air of cleanness; as if,
having bought them at the instigation of my instructor,
I had felt that this was enough, and that their mere
presence in my bookcase was a sufficient talisman;
a talisman the more effective because my instructor
had marked some of the chapters “R”—meaning,
no doubt, "Read carefully"—and other
chapters “RR” or "Read twice as carefully."
For these seem to be the only marks in some of the
books, and there are no traces of midnight oil nor
of that earnest thumb which one might expect from the
perspiring seeker after knowledge.
So I feel—indeed, I seem to remember—that
the years were not so wasted after all. When
I should have been looking after my quaternions, I
was doing something else, something not so useful to
one who would be a mathematician, but perhaps more
useful to a writer who had already learnt enough to
count the words in an article and to estimate the
number of guineas due to him. But whether this
be so or not, at least I have another reason for gratitude
that I treated some of these volumes so reverently.
For I have now sold them all to a secondhand bookseller,
and he at least was influenced by the clean look of
those which I had placed upon the top.
So they stand now, my books, in a shelf outside the
shop waiting for a new master. Fifteen shillings
I paid for some of them, and you or anybody else can
get them for three and sixpence, with my autograph
inside and the “R” and “RR”
of some of our most learned mathematicians. I
should like to hear from the purchaser, and to know
that he is giving my books as kind a home as I gave
them, treating them as reverently, exercising them
as gently. He can never be a mathematician, or
anything else, unless he has them on his shelves,
but let him not force his attentions upon them.
Left to themselves they will exert their own influence.
I shall wonder sometimes what he is going to be, this
young fellow who is now reading the books on which
I was brought up. Spurred on by the differential
equations, will he decide to be a lawyer, or will the
dynamics of a particle help him to realize his ambition
of painting? Well, whatever he becomes, I wish
him luck. And when he sells the books again,
may he get a better price than I did.
A Haunted House
We have been trying to hide it from each other, but
the truth must now come out. Our house is haunted.
Well, of course, anybody’s house might be haunted.
Anybody might have a headless ghost walking about
the battlements or the bath-room at midnight, and
if it were no more than that, I should not trouble
you with the details. But our house is haunted
in a peculiar way. No house that I have heard
of has ever been affected in quite this way before.
