The barns were very large and high, many of them three storeys and each storey lofty. The light inside was dim, a sort of dun colour, and the air very dry and full of a strange, not unpleasant smell. Everything was as clean as clean could be; no litter, no dirt, the floor nicely swept, the shelves that ran all round and rose, tier upon tier, in an enormous stand that occupied the whole centre of the place, all perfectly orderly. On the shelves the bulbs lay, every one smooth and clean and dry, sorted according to kind and quality; Mijnheer knew them all; he could, like a book-lover with his books, put his hand upon any that he wished in the dark. It seemed to Julia that there were hundreds upon hundreds of different sorts. Not only hyacinths and tulips and such well-known ones in endless sizes and varieties, but little roots with six and seven syllable names she had never heard before, and big roots, too, and strange cornery roots, a never-ending quantity. Mijnheer told her they were not yet all in; many were in the ground and had still to be lifted. This she knew, for she had seen the dead tops of some in the little enclosed squares where they grew; from her bedroom window, too, she saw others still in bloom--a patch, the size of a tennis-lawn squared, of scarlet ranunculous, little blood-red rosettes, sheltered by a high close-clipped hedge. And another patch of iris hispanica, fairy flowers of palest gold and lavender, quivering at the top of their grey-green stalks like tropical dragon-flies hovering over a field of growing oats. These it seemed, and many others, would be brought in by and by, then the great barns would be really full. Mijnheer took up a root here and there, telling her something of the history of each; explaining how the narcissus increased and the tulips grew; showing her hyacinth bulbs cut in half-breadthways with all the separate severed layers distended by reason of the growing and swelling of the seeds between. "Each little seed will be a bulb by and by," he said, "but not yet. When we cut the root first, we set it in the ground and these begin to grow and become in time as you see them now. Afterwards they grow bigger and bigger till their parent can no longer contain them." "Does it take long for them to grow full size?" Julia asked.