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