thick like bad pea-soup, taking him stringently in the throat.

How he found his way back to his room, walking thus in a maze, he never
could recall. As the door clicked and he turned towards the fireplace,
his eye fell upon a brown-paper parcel lying on the table. John
Arniston opened it out in an absent way, his mind and fancy still
abiding by the low chair in Miriam's room. What he saw smote him
suddenly pale. He laid his hand on the mantelpiece to keep from falling.
It was nothing more than a plain, thick quarto volume, covered with a
worn overcoat of undressed calf-skin. At the angle of the back and on
one side the rough hair was worn thin, and the skin showed through. His
mother had done that, reaching it down for his father to "take the
book"[2] in the old house at home. John Arniston sat down on the
easy-chair with the half-unwrapped parcel on his knee. His eye read the
pages without a letter printing itself on his retina. It was a book
within a book, and without also, which he read. He read the tale of the
smooth places on the side. No one in the world but himself could know
what he read. He saw this book, his father's great house Bible, lying
above a certain grey head, in the white square hole in the wall. Beneath
it was a copy of the _Drumfern Standard_, and on the top a psalm-book in
which were his mother's spectacles, put there when she took them off
after reading her afternoon portion.

[Footnote 2: Engage in family worship.]

He opened the book at random: "_And God spake all these words saying_
... THOU SHALT NOT--" The tremendous sentence smote him fairly on the
face. He threw his head violently back so that he might not read any
further. The book slipped between his knees and fell heavily on the
floor.