. He would take his pipe and walk
silently for long together about the untidy shrubberies in the evening,
for the acute pleasure of seeing the big horse chestnuts in flower; and
he never opened the hall door without a feeling of gratification in
its weight as it swung under his hand. In so far as he could, he
supplemented the idiosyncrasies he found. The drawing-room walls, though
mostly bare in their old-fashioned French paper--lavender and gilt, a
grape-vine pattern--held a few good engravings; the library was reduced
to contain a single bookcase, but it was filled with English classics.
John Murchison had been made a careful man, not by nature, by the
discipline of circumstances; but he would buy books. He bought them
between long periods of abstinence, during which he would scout the
expenditure of an unnecessary dollar, coming home with a parcel under
his arm for which he vouchsafed no explanation, and which would disclose
itself to be Lockhart, or Sterne, or Borrow, or Defoe. Mrs Murchison
kept a discouraging eye upon such purchases; and when her husband
brought home Chambers's Dictionary of English Literature, after shortly
and definitely repulsing her demand that he should get himself a new
winter overcoat, she declared that it was beyond all endurance. Mrs
Murchison was surrounded, indeed, by more of "that sort of thing"
than she could find use or excuse for; since, though books made but a
sporadic appearance, current literature, daily, weekly, and monthly,
was perpetually under her feet. The Toronto paper came as a matter of
course, as the London daily takes its morning flight into the provinces,
the local organ as simply indispensable, the Westminster as the
corollary of church membership and for Sunday reading. These were
constant, but there were also mutables--Once a Week, Good Words for
the Young, Blackwood's, and the Cornhill they used to be; years of back
numbers Mrs Murchison had packed away in the attic, where Advena
on rainy days came into the inheritance of them, and made an early
acquaintance with fiction in Ready Money Mortiboy and Verner's Pride,
while Lorne, flat on his stomach beside her, had glorious hours on The
Back of the North Wind. Their father considered such publications and
their successors essential, like tobacco and tea. He was also an easy
prey to the subscription agent, for works published in parts and
paid for in instalments, a custom which Mrs Murchison regarded with
abhorrence. So