I crossed the room and took down a book here and there at random from the shelves. From one or two, evidently old ones, the fly leaves had been neatly cut out; others had no mark of any kind. It came over me with a staggering certainty that here was no careless, makeshift impulse; a methodical, definite annihilation had been intended and accomplished. An extraordinary man had arranged this. What was the secret he had concealed so perfectly, and what had been his motive? What his necessity? Three or four comfortable chairs and a light wicker table completed the furniture of the room, which held--for me--the strange fascination of the living-room, that deep, impersonal sense of culture, that rigorous suppression of whim and irrelevant detail. The man (not so long dead, probably) who stood behind that room had stamped it indelibly, inevitably with the very character he had tried to eliminate from it. One wanted to have known him: one felt instinctively what a firm grip, what a level eye he had. The books were almost as little tell-tale as the rest. A fine set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; histories of all sorts, but only the best in every case; a little standard poetry; the great English novelists--Dickens much worn, Meredith's early works, the unquenchable Charles Reade, who has nursed so many fretful convalescents back to the harness; two or three fine editions of Shakespeare, one, a half-dozen small green volumes, worn loose from their bindings; Darwin, Huxley, and a dozen blazers of that wonderful trail, much underlined and cross-indexed, and a really remarkable collection of the great scientific travellers and explorers, that occupied much space; and a fair collection of French fiction and archaeological research and German scientific and historical work completed my first rough impression of this library. I have gone over it very carefully since, and amused myself with noting its omissions--quite as significant in such cases as the actual contents. No classics but the usual school and college text-books; no recent fiction; almost no American literature except the most reliable of the historians; none of the essayists or belle-lettrists, except Carlyle, Macaulay, and such like heavy artillery; nothing whatever of a religious nature but a small, worn Bible thick with dust, on the top shelf among the school-books. And there was not in the whole library one page or line or word to indicate that its owner was conversant with or interested in Italian or Italy. O builder of that sand-hued cottage, owner of that manly room of books, how many hours have I devoted to patient study of you! How many nights have I hunted you down, searched you out, compelled you to reveal yourself to me--and how strangely have I succeeded! It has been a labour of love, and I have sometimes felt I know your mind almost as my own.