nt of the garret fascinated Barrie, and made her heart beat
heavily, as if she were on the threshold of a mystery. It was made up of
many odours: a faint, not unpleasant mustiness, the smell of dust, a
perfume of old potpourri, and spices, cloves, and camphor for moths, a
vague fragrance of rosewood and worm-eaten oak, a hint of beeswax, a
tang of unaired leather and old books.

Barrie suddenly felt perfectly happy. For to-day this wonderful place
with all its secrets was hers. She hardly knew what to explore first.
All the really interesting things in the house seemed to have risen to
the top, like cream on milk. Along a part of one wall opposite the
stairs and under the east windows whence came the morning gold were
ranged rough old bookcases, a kind of alms-house for indigent books, or
a prison for condemned volumes. But what books! Barrie was drawn to them
as by many magnets, and almost tremulously taking down one after
another, she understood the reason of their banishment. Here were all
the darling books which used to live down in the library, and had been
exiled because she dipped into them, they being (according to Grandma
and Miss Hepburn) "most unsuitable for nice-minded girls." Barrie had
mourned her friends as dead, but they had been only sleeping. And there
were others, apparently far more unsuitable for nice-minded girls--old
leather-bound books with quaint wood engravings and thick yellow pages
printed with old-fashioned "s's" like "f's." Barrie could have browsed
among this company for hours, but there were so many things to see in
the garret, so little time for seeing them, that she felt compelled
merely to say "How do you do, and good-bye," to each allurement.

Her eyes, roaming like a pair of crusading knights in search of romance,
lighted suddenly on a pile or group of furniture in a distant corner.
There was other furniture in the garret, certainly more interesting to a
connoisseur and hunter of antiquities; but Barrie was neither. She had
contrived to seize upon a good deal of queer miscellaneous knowledge
outside lesson hours, yet she did not know the difference between
Sheraton and Hepplewhite. Chairs and sideboards and settees of Georgian
days and earlier had been relegated to this vast pound of unwanted
things, while their places were dishonourably filled downstairs by
mid-Victorian monstrosities which Mrs. MacDonald instinctively approved,
no doubt because they could offer no temptation to the