oner, with the entire
freedom of his study--a large airy room on the second floor, well
furnished with all manner of books, old prints, strange fishes in glass
cases, rods, guns, pipe-racks, curiosities of every kind from various
parts of the world--India, the South Seas, Australia, not forgetting
London and Paris--and all the flotsam and jetsam of a far-wandered man,
who--as the "King" remarked, introducing their autobiographic display
with a comprehensive wave of his hand--had, like that other wanderer
unbeloved of all schoolboys, the pious AEneas, been so much tossed about
on land and sea--_vi superum, saevae memorem Junonis ob iram_--that he
might found his city and bring safe his household gods from Latium.
Touching his hand lightly on a row of old quartos, in the stout calfskin
and tarnished gold dear to bookmen, he said:

"These I recommend to you in your enforced leisure."

They were a collection of old French voyages--Dampier and
others--embellished with copper-plate maps and quaint engravings of the
fauna and flora of the world, still in all the romantic virginity of its
first discovery.

"This," he said, pointing to a stout old jar of Devonshire ware, "is
some excellent English tobacco--my one extravagance; and here," pointing
to a pipe-rack, "are some well-tried friends from that same 'dear, dear
land,' 'sceptred isle of kings,' and so forth. And now I am going to
leave you, while I go with Samson and Erebus on a little reconnoitring
tour around our domains."

So he left me, and I settled down to a pipe and a volume of Dampier;
but, interesting as I found the sturdy old pages, my thoughts, and
perhaps particularly my heart, were too much in the present for my
attention long to be held by even so adventurous a past; so, laying the
book down, I rose from my chair, and made a tour of inspection of the
various eloquent objects about the room--objects which made a sort of
chronicle in bric-a-brac of my fantastic friend's earthly pilgrimage,
and here and there seemed to hint at the story of his strange soul.

Among the books, for example, was a fine copy of Homer, with the arms of
a well-known English college stamped on the binding, and near by was the
faded photograph of a beautiful old Elizabethan house, with mouldering
garden walls, and a moat brimming with water-lilies surrounding it.
Hanging close by it, was another faded photograph, of a tall stately old
lady, who, at a glance, I surmised must be the "K