He opened the gate and entered the yard, which was in fact a small garden. A planked footway led from the gate to the two wooden steps of the door in the wing, and a similar footway crossed this, and crooked around the side of the abutment. Lilac bushes were planted against the fence and the blind wall of the dwelling on the left, and there were shrubs and flowers on either side of the door, and around the wall of the wing. It was a pleasant spot, full of fragrance and retiracy. Without pausing, Harrington unlocked his door and entered his study. It was a square room, cool and quiet, lit by two green-curtained front windows which looked on the garden, and containing several hundred volumes on shelves, row above row, on three sides of the apartment. In the centre was a table loaded with books and papers, and an arm-chair. Four or five choice engravings hung in spaces between the book-shelves, and on one side, on a pedestal, was a noble bust of Lord Bacon. A set of foils and masks hung across the mantel, and a huge pair of dumb-bells lay on the floor in a corner. A carpet of green baize, an old sofa between the windows, and a few chairs, completed the furniture of the room, whose only other noticeable feature was a slanting step-ladder on one side, leading up by a trap in the ceiling into Harrington’s bed-chamber. Throwing himself into his arm-chair, the young scholar took from a drawer, and pressed to his lips, a little bunch of withered herbs, which Muriel had held in her hand one evening two or three weeks before, and given him at parting. Their dry balsamic odor stole softly to his brain, freighted with the thought of the white hand that gave them, and closing his eyes, he abandoned himself to ecstatic dreams. In a few minutes, a barrel-organ began to play outside his gate. It was a peculiarly sweet instrument—some people in the region of Beacon Hill may remember it as the one they used to follow from street to street on balmy summer evenings, so loth were they to part with its melody. Harrington was fond of all barrel-organs that were at all melodious—the poor man’s opera, he used to call them, associating them with the delight they gave to little children and the dwellers in poor houses, and always pleased to have them bring Italy into the street, as some one has felicitously phrased it. The organist, sure of his reward whenever his patron was at home, came often to the house. On this occasion, Harrington had no sooner heard the first notes, than he twisted up some change in paper, and opening the door, tossed it over the gate. The instrument stopped in the midst of the tune, and while the man was picking up the largesse, Harrington opened his windows, and resumed his chair to enjoy the music.