My mother came in as he ceased. He went up to her, put his arm round her waist and kissed her. Such caresses with him had not lost their tender charm by custom: my mother’s brow, before somewhat ruffled, grew smooth on the instant. Yet she lifted her eyes to his in soft surprise.
“I was but thinking,” said my father, apologetically, “how much I owed you, and how much I love you!”
CHAPTER II.
And now behold us, three days after my arrival, settled in all the state and grandeur of our own house in Russell Street, Bloomsbury, the library of the Museum close at hand. My father spends his mornings in those lata silentia, as Virgil calls the world beyond the grave. And a world beyond the grave we may well call that land of the ghosts,—a book collection.
“Pisistratus,” said my father one evening, as he arranged his notes before him and rubbed his spectacles, “Pisistratus, a great library is an awful place! There, are interred all the remains of men since the Flood.”
“It is a burial-place!” quoth my Uncle Roland, who had that day found us out.
“It is an Heraclea!” said my father.
“Please, not such hard words,” said the Captain, shaking his head.
“Heraclea was the city of necromancers, in which they raised the dead. Do want to speak to Cicero?—I invoke him. Do I want to chat in the Athenian market-place, and hear news two thousand years old?—I write down my charm on a slip of paper, and a grave magician calls me up Aristophanes. And we owe all this to our ancest—”