odes
as various--by doors, by open arches, by short passages, by steps up and
steps down.

In the great room I mainly spent my time, reading books of science,
old as well as new; for the history of the human mind in relation to
supposed knowledge was what most of all interested me. Ptolemy, Dante,
the two Bacons, and Boyle were even more to me than Darwin or Maxwell,
as so much nearer the vanished van breaking into the dark of ignorance.

In the evening of a gloomy day of August I was sitting in my usual
place, my back to one of the windows, reading. It had rained the greater
part of the morning and afternoon, but just as the sun was setting, the
clouds parted in front of him, and he shone into the room. I rose and
looked out of the window. In the centre of the great lawn the feathering
top of the fountain column was filled with his red glory. I turned to
resume my seat, when my eye was caught by the same glory on the one
picture in the room--a portrait, in a sort of niche or little shrine
sunk for it in the expanse of book-filled shelves. I knew it as the
likeness of one of my ancestors, but had never even wondered why it hung
there alone, and not in the gallery, or one of the great rooms, among
the other family portraits. The direct sunlight brought out the painting
wonderfully; for the first time I seemed to see it, and for the first
time it seemed to respond to my look. With my eyes full of the light
reflected from it, something, I cannot tell what, made me turn and cast
a glance to the farther end of the room, when I saw, or seemed to see,
a tall figure reaching up a hand to a bookshelf. The next instant, my
vision apparently rectified by the comparative dusk, I saw no one,
and concluded that my optic nerves had been momentarily affected from
within.

I resumed my reading, and would doubtless have forgotten the vague,
evanescent impression, had it not been that, having occasion a moment
after to consult a certain volume, I found but a gap in the row where it
ought to have stood, and the same instant remembered that just there I
had seen, or fancied I saw, the old man in search of a book. I looked
all about the spot but in vain. The next morning, however, there it
was, just where I had thought to find it! I knew of no one in the house
likely to be interested in such a book.

Three days after, another and yet odder thing took place.

In one of the walls was the low, narrow door of a closet, containing
some of t