One morning at breakfast, therefore, I asked Lord Hilton if I might
arrange and catalogue the books during my leisure hours. He replied:--

"Do anything you like with them, Mr. Campbell, except destroy them."

Now I was in my element. I never had been by any means a book-worm; but
the very outside of a book had a charm to me. It was a kind of
sacrament--an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace;
as, indeed, what on God's earth is not? So I set to work amongst the
books, and soon became familiar with many titles at least, which had
been perfectly unknown to me before. I found a perfect set of our
poets-perfect according to the notion of the editor and the issue of the
publisher, although it omitted both Chaucer and George Herbert. I began
to nibble at that portion of the collection which belonged to the
sixteenth century; but with little success. I found nothing, to my idea,
but love poems without any love in them, and so I soon became weary. But
I found in the library what I liked far better--many romances of a very
marvellous sort, and plentiful interruption they gave to the formation
of the catalogue. I likewise came upon a whole nest of the German
classics which seemed to have kept their places undisturbed, in virtue
of their unintelligibility. There must have been some well-read scholar
in the family, and that not long before, to judge by the near approach
of the line of this literature; happening to be a tolerable reader of
German, I found in these volumes a mine of wealth inexhaustible. I
learned from Mrs. Wilson that this scholar was a younger brother of Lord
Hilton, who had died about twenty years before. He had led a retired,
rather lonely life, was of a melancholy and brooding disposition, and
was reported to have had an unfortunate love-story. This was one of many
histories which she gave me. For the library being dusty as a catacomb,
the private room of Old Time himself, I had often to betake myself to