The old servant, whose grave, circumspect courtesy was a matter quite beyond Redclyffe’s experience, soon knocked at the chamber door, and suggested that the guest might desire to await the Warden’s arrival in the library, which was the customary sitting-room. Redclyffe assenting, he was ushered into a spacious apartment, lighted by various Gothic windows, surrounded with old oaken cases, in which were ranged volumes, most or many of which seemed to be coeval with the foundation of the hospital; and opening one of them, Redclyffe saw for the first time in his life [Endnote: 2] a genuine book-worm, that ancient form of creature living upon literature; it had gnawed a circular hole, penetrating through perhaps a score of pages of the seldom opened volume, and was still at his musty feast. There was a fragrance of old learning in this ancient library; a soothing influence, as the American felt, of time-honored ideas, where the strife, novelties, uneasy agitating conflict, attrition of unsettled theories, fresh-springing thought, did not attain a foothold; a good place to spend a life which should not be agitated with the disturbing element; so quiet, so peaceful; how slowly, with how little wear, would the years pass here! How unlike what he had hitherto known, and was destined to know,--the quick, violent struggle of his mother country, which had traced lines in his young brow already. How much would be saved by taking his former existence, not as dealing with things yet malleable, but with fossils, things that had had their life, and now were unchangeable, and revered, here!