"Not much," I had to confess, "But there were three books of his my father had, which I've read. And there's a picture of him still in the library."
"Which books? What picture?"
"'The French Revolution,' and 'Hero Worship,' and 'Sartor Resartus,' It was that last one I read first. I took it off the shelf because it had such a queer name. I wanted to find out what it meant. Don't you always desperately want to find out what everything means? I do. But I suppose you know everything by now. Well, I began to read without being so very much interested. Then, suddenly, my mind seemed to wake up. It was a wonderful feeling, just as if I stood near to a man who was playing marvellous and startling music on the grandest organ ever made. And the man who played could sing too. He sang in a voice sometimes harsh and sometimes sweet. It seemed to me as I read the book that it was humorous and sad, tender and stern at the same time. And till the very end I was carried along on the wave of that organ music, which had in it always a thrill of the divine. I never found any other book in the library that made me feel exactly like that, except Shakespeare—and Grandma had all the Shakespeare volumes carted off to the garret after she came in one day when I was eleven, and found me reading 'Macbeth.' As for the picture of Carlyle, it shows him, sitting in a chair, with a look on his face of a sad man alone in a gray world."
"Whistler's portrait! You shall have all Carlyle's works and Shakespeare's for your own. I'll give them to you," said Sir Somerled, looking at me with an interested look, as if suddenly he liked me better than he had before.
"Oh, you are good, and I should love to have them," I said. "But now there'll be my mother I shall have to ask permission of for everything. I must do just what she wants me to do, for I shall die if she doesn't love me."
"Yes. I'd forgotten," said he.
"I hadn't, for a minute," I answered. "But I suppose, as mother is a great actress, she loves Shakespeare and has all his works; and perhaps she has Carlyle, too, in her library."
"Perhaps," he echoed.
"Don't you like her?" I asked. "You always look odd, and speak in a short, snappy way when I talk of my mother."
"I like and admire her immensely," he answered, in that remote tone which tries to frighten me, and does almost—but not quite. "All the same, I don't think you'll find Carlyle in her library, so you'll have to let me give him to you. But meanwhile, you shall learn to understand him better by seeing the little village where he was born, and the house his father the stonemason built."