the curving walls filled with myriads of
books. In the centre was a circular arrangement of desks, and in the
midst of these an elderly man, like a garden-spider in his web; but it
was his duty to feed, not devour, the human flies who sat or walked to
and fro with literary meat gathered from all over the world. It was my
first vision of a great library.

Another time we went--all of us, I think--to the Tower of London. I
vibrated with joy at the spectacle of the array of figures in armor, and
picked out, a score of times, the suit I would most gladly choose to put
on. Here were St. George, King Arthur, Sir Scudamour, Sir Lancelot--all
but their living faces and their knightly deeds! Then I found myself
immured in dungeons with walls twenty feet thick, darksome and
low-browed, with tiny windows, and some of them bearing on their stones
strange inscriptions, cut there by captives who were nevermore to issue
thence, save to the block. Here the great Raleigh had been confined;
here, the lovable, rash-tempered Essex; here, the noble Sir Henry Vane,
who had once trod the rocky coast of my own New England. Everywhere
stood on the watch or paced about the Beef-eaters in their brilliant
fifteenth-century motley. I have never since then passed the portals of
the Tower, nor seen again the incomparable gleam of the Koh-i-noor--if
it were, indeed, the Koh-i-noor that I saw, and not a glass model
foisted on my innocence.

Again, I followed my father down many flights of steps, into the bowels
of the earth; but there were lights there, and presently we passed
through a sort of turnstile, and saw lengthening out before us two
endless open tubes, of diameter twice or thrice the height of a man,
with people walking in them, and disappearing in their interminable
perspective. We, too, entered and began to traverse them, and after we
had proceeded about half-way my father told me that the river Thames was
flowing over our heads, with its ships on its surface, and its fishes,
and its bottom of mud and gravel--under all these this illuminated
corridor, with ourselves breathing and seeing and walking therein. Would
we ever again behold the upper world and the sky? The atmosphere was not
pleasant, and I was glad to find myself climbing up another flight of
stairs and emerging on the other side of the river, which we had crossed
on foot, dry-shod.

Of the famous personages of this epoch I did not see much; only I
remember that a woman who s