ably out
of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and
recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to
recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their
cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should
move out of Concord.

Thoreau: "WALKING."

CHAPTER I. THE LIBRARY

I had just finished my studies at Oxford, and was taking a brief holiday
from work before assuming definitely the management of the estate. My
father died when I was yet a child; my mother followed him within a
year; and I was nearly as much alone in the world as a man might find
himself.

I had made little acquaintance with the history of my ancestors. Almost
the only thing I knew concerning them was, that a notable number of them
had been given to study. I had myself so far inherited the tendency as
to devote a good deal of my time, though, I confess, after a somewhat
desultory fashion, to the physical sciences. It was chiefly the wonder
they woke that drew me. I was constantly seeing, and on the outlook to
see, strange analogies, not only between the facts of different sciences
of the same order, or between physical and metaphysical facts, but
between physical hypotheses and suggestions glimmering out of the
metaphysical dreams into which I was in the habit of falling. I was at
the same time much given to a premature indulgence of the impulse to
turn hypothesis into theory. Of my mental peculiarities there is no
occasion to say more.

The house as well as the family was of some antiquity, but no
description of it is necessary to the understanding of my narrative.
It contained a fine library, whose growth began before the invention
of printing, and had continued to my own time, greatly influenced, of
course, by changes of taste and pursuit. Nothing surely can more impress
upon a man the transitory nature of possession than his succeeding to
an ancient property! Like a moving panorama mine has passed from before
many eyes, and is now slowly flitting from before my own.

The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house
and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an encroaching state,
absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater part of
the ground floor. Its chief room was large, and the walls of it were
covered with books almost to the ceiling; the rooms into which it
overflowed were of various sizes and shapes, and communicated in m