etude of the library,
with its blackened mahogany table, its faded green Axminster, the
meridional globe with its dusty twinkle, banished the incident from his
mind. He returned to his work of card-indexing the Captain's books. He
took half a dozen at a time from the shelves, dusted them on the piazza,
then carried them to the embrasure of the window, which offered a
pleasant light for reading and for writing the cards.

He went through volume after volume,--speeches by Clay, Calhoun, Yancy,
Prentiss, Breckenridge; an old life of General Taylor, Foxe's "Book of
Martyrs"; a collection of the old middle-English dramatists, such as
Lillo, Garrick, Arthur Murphy, Charles Macklin, George Colman, Charles
Coffey, men whose plays have long since declined from the boards and
disappeared from the reading-table.

The Captain's collection of books was strongly colored by a religious
cast,--John Wesley's sermons, Charles Wesley's hymns; a treatise
presenting a biblical proof that negroes have no souls; a little book
called "Flowers Gathered," which purported to be a compilation of the
sayings of ultra-pious children, all of whom died young; an old book
called "Elements of Criticism," by Henry Home of Kames; another tome
entitled "Studies of Nature," by St. Pierre. This last was a long
argument for the miraculous creation of the world as set forth in
Genesis. The proof offered was a resume of the vegetable, animal, and
mineral kingdoms, showing their perfect fitness for man's use, and the
immediate induction was that they were designed for man's use. Still
another work calculated the exact age of the earth by the naive method
of counting the generations from Adam to Christ, to the total adding
eighteen hundred and eighty-five years (for the book was written in
1885), and the original six days it required the Lord to build the
earth. By referring to Genesis and finding out precisely what the
Creator did on the morning of the first day, the writer contrived to
bring his calculation of the age of the earth and everything in the
world to a precision of six hours, give or take,--a somewhat closer
schedule than that made by the Tennessee river boats coming up from St.
Louis.

These and similar volumes formed the scientific section of Captain
Renfrew's library, and it was this paucity of the natural sciences that
formed the problem which Peter tried to solve. All scientific additions
came to an abrupt stop about the decade of 1880-90. Th