This was
beyond and behind the dining-room. Book-shelves towered on all sides,
filled with volumes of all sizes, and in nearly all languages, some in
exquisitely neat white vellum binding, with Tome One, Tome Two,
etcetera, in shining gold on their backs--the products of an age when a
conscientiousness could be traced in the perfect finish of all the
details of a work external or internal; some in the form of stately
folios, suggestive at once both of the solidity and depth of learning
possessed by the writers and expected in the readers; while a multitude
of lesser volumes were crowded together, some erect, others lying flat,
or leaning against one another for support. Greek and Latin classic
authors, and in all languages poets, historians, and specially writers
on science were largely represented--even French and German octavoes
standing at ease in long regiments side by side, suggestive of no
Franco-Prussian war, but only of an intellectual contest, arising out of
amicable differences of opinion. On one side of the principal bookcase
was an electrical machine, and on the other an air-pump; while a rusty
sword and a pair of ancient gauntlets served as links to connect the
warlike past with the pacific present. In the centre of the room was a
large leather-covered writing-table, on which lay a perfect chaos of
printed matter and manuscript; while bottles of ink, red, black, and
blue, might be seen emerging from the confusion like diminutive forts
set there to guard the papers from unlearned and intrusive fingers.
Order was clearly not the doctor's "first law;" and certainly it must
have required no common powers of memory to enable him, when seated in
front of the confusion he himself had made, to lay his hand upon any
particular book or manuscript which might claim his immediate attention.
On either side of a small fire-place at the rear of the table, and
above it, hung charts, historical, geological, and meteorological; while
a very dim portrait of some friend of the doctor, or perhaps of some
literary celebrity, looked down from over the doorway through a haze of
venerable dust on the scientific labours which it could neither share
nor lighten.

In the corner of the room farthest from the door was a little closet,
seldom opened, secured by a patent lock, whose contents no one was
acquainted with save the doctor himself. The housemaid, whose duties in
this room were confined to an occasional wary sweeping and du