faint green is coming again like a mist among the
ash-trees, while the oak is still dead and bare. Last year the oak came
first.

They say we shall have a wet summer.

PART TWO (_Continued_)

THE WONDER AMONG BOOKS

PART TWO (_Continued_)

THE WONDER AMONG BOOKS

CHAPTER IX

HIS PASSAGE THROUGH THE PRISON OF KNOWLEDGE

I

Challis led the way to the library; Lewes, petulant and mutinous, hung
in the rear.

The Wonder toddled forward, unabashed, to enter his new world. On the
threshold, however, he paused. His comprehensive stare took in a
sweeping picture of enclosing walls of books, and beyond was a vista of
further rooms, of more walls all lined from floor to ceiling with
records of human discovery, endeavour, doubt, and hope.

The Wonder stayed and stared. Then he took two faltering steps into the
room and stopped again, and, finally, he looked up at Challis with doubt
and question; his gaze no longer quelling and authoritative, but
hesitating, compliant, perhaps a little child-like.

"'Ave you read all these?" he asked.

It was a curious picture. The tall figure of Challis, stooping, as
always, slightly forward; Challis, with his seaman's eyes and scholar's
head, his hands loosely clasped together behind his back, paying such
scrupulous attention to that grotesque representative of a higher
intellectuality, clothed in the dress of a villager, a patched
cricket-cap drawn down over his globular skull, his little arms hanging
loosely at his sides; who, nevertheless, even in this new, strange
aspect of unwonted humility bore on his face the promise of some
ultimate development which differentiated him from all other humanity,
as the face of humanity is differentiated from the face of its
prognathous ancestor.

The scene is set in a world of books, and in the background lingers the
athletic figure and fair head of Lewes, the young Cambridge
undergraduate, the disciple of science, hardly yet across the threshold
which divides him from the knowledge of his own ignorance.

"'Ave you read all these?" asked the Wonder.

"A greater part of them--in effect," replied Challis. "There is much
repetition, you understand, and much record of experiment which becomes,
in a sense, worthless when the conclusions are either finally accepted
or rejected."

The eyes of the Wonder shifted and their expression became abstracted;
he seemed to lose consciousness of the outer world; he wore the look
w