"You must look on Clayton and myself as very near relatives. We have no children, but our hearts are large. I shall expect you to write to me sometimes and to come and stay with us now and then." CHAPTER IX In the centre of the reading-room at the British Museum sit four men fenced about by a quadruple ring of unwieldy volumes which are an index to all the knowledge in the world. The four men know those volumes as a good courier knows the Continental Bradshaw, and all day long, from early morning, when the attendants, self-propelled on wheeled stools, run around the rings arranging and aligning the huge blue tomes, to late afternoon, when the immense dome is like a dark night and the arc lamps hiss and crackle in the silence, they answer questions, patiently, courteously; they are seldom embarrassed and less seldom in the wrong. Radiating in long rows from the central fortress of learning, a diversified company of readers disposes itself: bishops, statesmen, men of science, historians, needy pedants, popular authors whose broughams are waiting in the precincts, journalists, medical students, law students, curates, hack-writers, women with clipped hair and black aprons, idlers; all short-sighted and all silent. Every few minutes an official enters in charge of an awed group of country visitors, and whispers mechanically the unchanging formula: "Eighty thousand volumes in this room alone: thirty-six miles of bookshelves in the Museum altogether." Whereupon the visitors stare about them, the official unsuccessfully endeavours not to let it appear that the credit of the business belongs entirely to himself, and the party retires again. Vague, reverberating noises roll heavily from time to time across the chamber, but no one looks up; the incessant cannibal feast of the living upon the dead goes speechlessly forward; the trucks of food are always moving to and fro, and the nonchalant waiters seem to take no rest. Almost Richard's first care on coming to London had been to obtain a reader's ticket for the British Museum, and for several months he had made a practice of spending Saturday afternoon there, following no special line of study or research, and chiefly contenting himself with desultory reading in the twenty thousand volumes which could be reached down without the slow machinery of an order form. After a time the charm of the place had dwindled, and other occupations filled his Saturday afternoons.