me as about as big as Sarmatia in the store-room Atlas--were islands and
archipelagoes of chintz-covered chairs and couches, tables, great Sevres
vases on pedestals, a bronze man and horse. Somewhere in this wilderness
one came, I remember, upon--a big harp beside a lyre-shaped music stand,
and a grand piano....

The book-borrowing raid was one of extraordinary dash and danger.

One came down the main service stairs--that was legal, and illegality
began in a little landing when, very cautiously, one went through a red
baize door. A little passage led to the hall, and here one reconnoitered
for Ann, the old head-housemaid--the younger housemaids were friendly
and did not count. Ann located, came a dash across the open space at
the foot of that great staircase that has never been properly descended
since powder went out of fashion, and so to the saloon door. A beast
of an oscillating Chinaman in china, as large as life, grimaced and
quivered to one's lightest steps. That door was the perilous place; it
was double with the thickness of the wall between, so that one could not
listen beforehand for the whisk of the feather-brush on the other side.
Oddly rat-like, is it not, this darting into enormous places in pursuit
of the abandoned crumbs of thought?

And I found Langhorne's "Plutarch" too, I remember, on those shelves. It
seems queer to me now to think that I acquired pride and self-respect,
the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in such a furtive
fashion; queer, too, that it should rest with an old Greek, dead these
eighteen hundred years to teach that.

VI