In the great room I mainly spent my time, reading books of science,
old as well as new; for the history of the human mind in relation
to supposed knowledge was what most of all interested me. Ptolemy,
Dante, the two Bacons, and Boyle were even more to me than Darwin or
Maxwell, as so much nearer the vanished van breaking into the dark
of ignorance.

In the evening of a gloomy day of August I was sitting in my usual
place, my back to one of the windows, reading. It had rained the
greater part of the morning and afternoon, but just as the sun was
setting, the clouds parted in front of him, and he shone into the
room. I rose and looked out of the window. In the centre of the
great lawn the feathering top of the fountain column was filled with
his red glory. I turned to resume my seat, when my eye was caught
by the same glory on the one picture in the room--a portrait, in a
sort of niche or little shrine sunk for it in the expanse of
book-filled shelves. I knew it as the likeness of one of my
ancestors, but had never even wondered why it hung there alone,
and not in the gallery, or one of the great rooms, among the other
family portraits. The direct sunlight brought out the painting
wonderfully; for the first time I seemed to see it, and for the
first time it seemed to respond to my look. With my eyes full of
the light reflected from it, something, I cannot tell what, made me
turn and cast a glance to the farther end of the room, when I saw,
or seemed to see, a tall figure reaching up a hand to a bookshelf.
The next instant, my vision apparently rectified by the comparative
dusk, I saw no one, and concluded that my optic nerves had been
momentarily affected from within.