of an English friend of mine--an
infantry major--one or two bayonets, a curious Japanese sword and a
curved dagger whose workmanship was quite unknown to me, completed
this decoration, which was the only one on the walls. In the centre of
the floor stood a large table-desk of well-polished cherry with a
heavy glass ink-well, pin-tray, letter-rack, etc., and a fair, clean
square of blotting-paper. But none of the customary litter of such a
desk was upon it; all was swept and garnished, orderly and bare. The
drawers were empty, the ink-well pure, the very pens new. There was
not the faintest hint of what work had gone on at that desk.

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 imp