His books, his many books, how well chosen they were! Long lines of the great English poets adorned the shelves. Chaucer, Shakspere, Spenser, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning--all who had sung nobly and sung well--had there a place; but not a volume of the slimy and effeminate effusions of the fleshly school, or of the grovelling and un-English adulators of French infidels, anarchists, and petroleuses. The unapproachable novels of Sir Walter Scott, and the works of Dickens, Charles Kingsley, and Hawthorne, seemed, from the care bestowed upon their bindings, to be the especial favourites of their owner; and the _Religio Medici_ and _Hydriotaphia_ of Sir Thomas Browne, _The Compleat Angler_ of Izaak Walton, the _Icon Basilike_ with its quaint frontispiece, Miss Burney’s _Evelina_, and the _Vicar of Wakefield_, showed that Wilfred Manwaring was not unappreciative of the older masters of English literature--“stars in the elder darkness of our loved fatherland.” Natural Science, too, held a large place in the boy’s collection, and works on Geology, Natural History, Topography, Antiquities, and History were largely represented. In one corner was a cabinet of fossils collected by the owner, in another a collection of local antiquities. On the walls, amongst the photographs and prints which erewhile had adorned his snug study at Eton, were hung ancient pikes and swords, which of old time had done good service for king or parliament in the hands of stout Lancashire gentry and yeomen; and over the fireplace was the great Golden Eagle which Wilfred had shot on Stanwick Edge, the last vacation he spent at home--a trophy he was even prouder of than of the numerous silver cups he had won at the athletic sports at school.