When he awoke, the shadows of boughs and budding twigs were waving in
changeful network-tracery, across the bright sunshine on his
window-curtains. Before he was called he was ready to go down; and to
amuse himself till breakfast-time, he proceeded to make another survey of
the books. He concluded that these must be a colony from the
mother-library; and also that the room must, notwithstanding, be intended
for his especial occupation, seeing his bedroom opened out of it. Next, he
looked from all the windows, to discover into what kind of a furrow on the
face of the old earth he had fallen. All he could see was trees and trees.
But oh! how different from the sombre, dark, changeless fir-wood at
Turriepuffit! whose trees looked small and shrunken in his memory, beside
this glory of boughs, breaking out into their prophecy of an infinite
greenery at hand. His rooms seemed to occupy the end of a small wing at
the back of the house, as well as he could judge. His sitting-room windows
looked across a small space to another wing; and the windows of his
bedroom, which were at right-angles to those of the former, looked full
into what seemed an ordered ancient forest of gracious trees of all kinds,
coming almost close to the very windows. They were the trees which had
been throwing their shadows on these windows for two or three hours of the
silent spring sunlight, at once so liquid and so dazzling. Then he
resolved to test his faculty for discovery, by seeing whether he could
find his way to the breakfast-room without a guide. In this he would have
succeeded without much difficulty, for it opened from the main-entrance
hall, to which the huge square-turned oak staircase, by which he had
ascended, led; had it not been for the somewhat intricate nature of the
passages leading from the wing in which his rooms were (evidently an older
and more retired portion of the house) to the main staircase itself. After
opening many doors and finding no thoroughfare, he became convinced that,
in place of finding a way on, he had lost the way back. At length he came
to a small stair, which led him down to a single door. This he opened, and
straightway found himself in the library, a long, low, silent-looking
room, every foot of the walls of which was occupied with books in varied
and rich bindings. The lozenge-paned windows, with thick stone mullions,
were much overgrown with ivy, throwing a cool green shadowiness into the
room. One of them, however, had been altered to a more modern taste, and
opened with folding-doors upon a few steps, descending into an
old-fashioned, terraced garden. To approach this window he had to pass a
table, lying on which he saw a paper with verses on it, evidently in a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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