I opened the window, which looked on the Strand. The noise, the voices, the trampling feet, the rolling wheels, became loudly audible. My father leaned out for some moments, and I stood by his side. He turned to me with a serene face. "Every ant on the hill," said he, "carries its load, and its home is but made by the burden that it bears. How happy am I! how I should bless God! How light my burden! how secure my home!" My mother came in as he ceased. He went up to her, put his arm round her waist and kissed her. Such caresses with him had not lost their tender charm by custom: my mother's brow, before somewhat ruffled, grew smooth on the instant. Yet she lifted her eyes to his in soft surprise. "I was but thinking," said my father, apologetically, "how much I owed you, and how much I love you!" CHAPTER II. And now behold us, three days after my arrival, settled in all the state and grandeur of our own house in Russell Street, Bloomsbury, the library of the Museum close at hand. My father spends his mornings in those lata silentia, as Virgil calls the world beyond the grave. And a world beyond the grave we may well call that land of the ghosts,--a book collection. "Pisistratus," said my father one evening, as he arranged his notes before him and rubbed his spectacles, "Pisistratus, a great library is an awful place! There, are interred all the remains of men since the Flood." "It is a burial-place!" quoth my Uncle Roland, who had that day found us out. "Please, not such hard words," said the Captain, shaking his head. "Heraclea was the city of necromancers, in which they raised the dead. Do want to speak to Cicero?---I invoke him. Do I want to chat in the Athenian market-place, and hear news two thousand years old?---I write down my charm on a slip of paper, and a grave magician calls me up Aristophanes. And we owe all this to our ancest--" "Ancestors who wrote books; thank you." Here Roland offered his snuff-box to my father, who, abhorring snuff, benignly imbibed a pinch, and sneezed five times in consequence,--an excuse for Uncle Roland to say, which he did five times, with great unction, "God bless you, brother Austin!" As soon as my father had recovered himself, he proceeded, with tears in his eyes, but calm as before the interruption--for he was of the philosophy of the Stoics,-- "But it is not that which is awful. It is the presuming to vie with these `spirits elect;' to say to them, 'Make way,--I too claim place with the chosen. I too would confer with the living, centuries after the death that consumes my dust. I too--' Ah, Pisistratus! I wish Uncle Jack had been at Jericho before he had brought me up to London and placed me in the midst of those rulers of the world!"