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 XV. 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_, wide silences, 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 I 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----" "Brother!" "Ancestors, who wrote books--thank you." Here Roland offered his snuff-box to my father, who, abhorring snuff, benignly imbibed a pinch, and sneezed five times in consequence: an excuse for Uncle Roland to say, which he did five times, with great unction, "God bless you, brother Austin!" As soon as my father had recovered himself, he proceeded, with tears in his eyes, but calm as before the interruption--for he was of the philosophy of the Stoics:-- "But it is not _that_ which is awful. It is the presuming to vie with these 'spirits elect:' to say to them, 'Make way--I too claim place with the chosen. I too would confer with the living, centuries after the death that consumes my dust. I too'--Ah, Pisistratus! I wish Uncle Jack had been at Jericho, before he had brought me up to London, and placed me in the midst of those rulers of the world!"