often plied with questions about it, but he always answered simply that
he didn't think Mr. Anderson would like to have it talked about. For the
owner there must have been some inside mode of access to the second
story, but he did not choose to let even August know of any other way
than that by the rope-ladder, and the few strangers who came to see his
books were taken in by the same drawbridge.

[Illustration: THE CASTLE.]

The room was filled with books arranged after whimsical associations.
One set of cases, for instance, was called the Academy, and into these
he only admitted the masters, following the guidance of his own
eccentric judgment quite as much as he followed traditional estimate.
Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton of course had undisputed possession of
the department devoted to the "Kings of Epic," as he styled them.
Sophocles, Calderon, Corneille, and Shakespeare were all that he
admitted to his list of "Kings of Tragedy." Lope he rejected on literary
grounds, and Goethe because he thought his moral tendency bad. He
rejected Rabelais from his chief humorists, but accepted Cervantes, Le
Sage, Molière, Swift, Hood, and the then fresh Pickwick of Boz. To these
he added the Georgia Scenes of Mr. Longstreet, insisting that they were
quite equal to Don Quixote. I can only stop to mention one other
department in his Academy. One case was devoted to the "Best Stories,"
and an admirable set they were! I wish that anything of mine were worthy
to go into such company. His purity of feeling, almost ascetic, led him
to reject Boccaccio, but he admitted Chaucer and some of Balzac's, and
Smollett, Goldsmith, and De Foe, and Walter Scott's best, Irving's Rip
Van Winkle, Bernardin St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," and "Three
Months under the Snow," and Charles Lamb's generally overlooked
"Rosamund Gray." There were eases for "Socrates and his Friends," and