the utmost taste and skill of the cabinet-maker's art. In the centre of
the room a wide and substantial table was set with all the paraphernalia
of correspondence, and the leathery abysses of three or four vast
easy-chairs invited the reader to bookish self-abandonment.

"How glorious!" cried Jane, as her eyes ranged over the ranks and rows of
formal and costly bindings. It all seemed doubly glorious after that poor
sole bookcase of theirs at home--a huge black-walnut thing like a
wardrobe, with a couple of drawers at the bottom, receptacles that seemed
less adapted to pamphlets than to goloshes. "How grand!" Jane was not
exigent as regarded music, but her whole being went forth towards books.
"Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer; and Hume and Gibbon, and Johnson's
_Lives of the Poets_, and--"

"And twenty or thirty yards of Scott," Mrs. Bates broke in, genially;
"and enough Encyclopaedia Britannica to reach around the corner and back
again. Sets--sets--sets."

"What a lovely chair to sit and study in!" cried Jane, not at all abashed
by her hostess's comments. "What a grand table to sit and write papers
at!" Writing papers was one of Jane's chief interests.

"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Bates, with a quiet toleration, as she glanced
towards the shining inkstand and the immaculate blotting-pad. "But,
really, I don't suppose I've written two lines at that table since it was
put there. And as for all these books, Heaven only knows where the keys
are to get at them with. I can't do anything with them; why, some of them
weigh five or six pounds!"

Jane shrivelled and shivered under this. She regretted doubly that she