My mother came in as he ceased. He went up to
her, put his arm round her waist and kissed her.
Such caresses with him had not lost their tender
charm by custom: my mother’s brow, before
somewhat ruffled, grew smooth on the instant.
Yet she lifted her eyes to his in soft surprise.
“I was but thinking,” said my father,
apologetically, “how much I owed you, and how
much I love you!”
And now behold us, three days after my arrival, settled
in all the state and grandeur of our own house in
Russell Street, Bloomsbury, the library of the Museum
close at hand. My father spends his mornings
in those lata silentia, as Virgil calls the world
beyond the grave. And a world beyond the grave
we may well call that land of the ghosts,—a
book collection.
“Pisistratus,” said my father one evening,
as he arranged his notes before him and rubbed his
spectacles, “Pisistratus, a great library is
an awful place! There, are interred all the remains
of men since the Flood.”
“It is a burial-place!” quoth my Uncle
Roland, who had that day found us out.
“Please, not such hard words,” said the
Captain, shaking his head.
“Heraclea was the city of necromancers, in which
they raised the dead. Do want to speak to Cicero?—–I
invoke him. Do I want to chat in the Athenian
market-place, and hear news two thousand years old?—–I
write down my charm on a slip of paper, and a grave
magician calls me up Aristophanes. And we owe
all this to our ancest—”
“Ancestors who wrote books; thank you.”
Here Roland offered his snuff-box to my father, who,
abhorring snuff, benignly imbibed a pinch, and sneezed
five times in consequence,—an excuse for
Uncle Roland to say, which he did five times, with
great unction, “God bless you, brother Austin!”
As soon as my father had recovered himself, he proceeded,
with tears in his eyes, but calm as before the interruption—for
he was of the philosophy of the Stoics,—
“But it is not that which is awful. It
is the presuming to vie with these `spirits elect;’
to say to them, ’Make way,—I too claim
place with the chosen. I too would confer with
the living, centuries after the death that consumes
my dust. I too—’ Ah, Pisistratus!
I wish Uncle Jack had been at Jericho before he had
brought me up to London and placed me in the midst
of those rulers of the world!”
I was busy, while my father spoke, in making some
pendent shelves for these “spirits elect;”
for my mother, always provident where my father’s
comforts were concerned, had foreseen the necessity
of some such accommodation in a hired lodging-house,
and had not only carefully brought up to town my little
box of tools, but gone out herself that morning to
buy the raw materials. Checking the plane in
its progress over the smooth deal, “My dear
father,” said I, “if at the Philhellenic
Institute I had looked with as much awe as you do on
the big fellows that had gone before me, I should
have stayed, to all eternity, the lag of the Infant
Division.”
