see how she was going to manage it.

"Come with me," was her smiling reply, "and see if I am not as good as
my word."

My susceptibility to surprise had been pretty well exhausted by the
numerous shocks it had received, but it was with some wonderment that I
followed her into a room which I had not before entered. It was a
small, cosy apartment, walled with cases filled with books.

"Here are your friends," said Edith, indicating one of the cases, and
as my eye glanced over the names on the backs of the volumes,
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Defoe, Dickens,
Thackeray, Hugo, Hawthorne, Irving, and a score of other great writers
of my time and all time, I understood her meaning. She had indeed made
good her promise in a sense compared with which its literal fulfillment
would have been a disappointment. She had introduced me to a circle of
friends whom the century that had elapsed since last I communed with
them had aged as little as it had myself. Their spirit was as high,
their wit as keen, their laughter and their tears as contagious, as
when their speech had whiled away the hours of a former century. Lonely
I was not and could not be more, with this goodly companionship,
however wide the gulf of years that gaped between me and my old life.

"You are glad I brought you here," exclaimed Edith, radiant, as she
read in my face the success of her experiment. "It was a good idea, was
it not, Mr. West? How stupid in me not to think of it before! I will
leave you now with your old friends, for I know there will be no
company for you like them just now; but remember you must not let old
friends make you quite forget new ones!" and with that smiling caution
she left me.

Attracted by the most familiar of the names before me, I laid my hand
on a volume of Dickens, and sat down to read. He had been my prime
favorite among the bookwriters of the century,--I mean the nineteenth
century,--and a week had rarely passed in my old life during which I
had not taken up some volume of his works to while away an idle hour.
Any volume with which I had been familiar would have produced an
extraordinary impression, read under my present circumstances, but my
exceptional familiarity with Dickens, and his consequent power to call
up the associations of my former life, gave to his writings an effect
no others could have had, to intensify, by force of contrast, my
appreciation of the strangeness of my present environment.