“There, now the room looks as it did when Uncle Jasper inhabited it,” she remarked when the extra pieces had been cleared out.
“It certainly was a pleasant room; I don’t see how Uncle Jasper could have maintained such a gloomy disposition as he did, working all day in a room like this. The very sight of that open field out there makes me want to run and shout—and that window! Oh, who could look at it all day long and be crusty and sour?”
“But he had the shutter over the window,” Sahwah reminded her.
“Yes, he did, the poor man!” said Nyoda in a tone of pity. She whisked about the room, straightening out rugs and wiping the dust from the furniture, and soon announced that she was ready to begin investigations. She looked carefully through the desk first, through old account books and files of papers and bills, but came upon nothing that touched upon repairs made to the house. There was a long bookcase running the entire length of one wall, and she tackled this next, while the Winnebagos sat around expectantly and Sylvia looked on from her chair, which she could move herself from place to place, to her infinite delight.
The boys had gone downstairs with Sherry to hear reminiscences from “across.” All three boys worshipped Sherry like a god. To have been “across,” to have seen actual fighting, to have been cited for bravery, and finally to have been shipwrecked, were experiences for which the younger boys would have given their ears, and they treated Sherry with a deferential respect that actually embarrassed him at times.
Nyoda opened the bookcase and began taking out the books that crowded the shelves, opening them one by one and examining their contents. Most of them were works on history, some of them Uncle Jasper’s own; great solid looking volumes with fine print and dingy leather bindings. Ancient history, nearly all of them, and nowhere among them anything so modern as to concern Carver House.
“What a collection of dry-as-dust works to have for your most intimate reading matter!” exclaimed Nyoda, making a wry face at the books. “Not a single book of verse, not a single romance or book of fiction, not the ghost of a love story! There are plenty of them downstairs in the library, that belonged to Uncle Jasper’s father and mother, who must have had quite a lively taste in reading, judging from the books down there; but Hercules told me that Uncle Jasper hadn’t opened the cases down there for twenty-five years. He never read anything but this ancient stuff up here.
“He did write one book that had some life in it, though,” she continued musingly. “That was a story of the life of Elizabeth Carver, his great grandmother, the one whose portrait hangs downstairs over the harp in the drawing-room. He’s got all her various love affairs in it, and it’s anything but dry. I sat up a whole night reading it the time I came across it in the library down below. But from the date of its publishing, Uncle Jasper must have been a very young man when he wrote it, probably before the ancient history spider bit him.”
“And before the shutter went up,” added Sahwah.
“Well,” said Nyoda, after she had peeped into nearly every book in the bookcase, “there doesn’t seem to be anything here more modern than the Fall of Rome, and that’s still several seasons behind the affairs of Carver House. Hello, what’s this?” she suddenly exclaimed, holding up a book she had just picked up, one that had fallen down behind the others on the shelf.