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. . . It was queer how he would sometimes come to himself out of a daze of thought, and find himself in some place without knowing how he had got there. Just as two hours ago he had found himself upon the lawn at Conster, now he found himself in his study at Leasan Parsonage. He could not tell how. He had come in through the house and garden. Yet here he was appropriately gazing at his books, his old companions, his only treasure, all that he had saved out of the withering of his years . . . the sun burned low upon them through the little leaded window, waking up their dim colours and filling the air with the warm, musty smell of their ancient leather bindings.

A queer smile twisted and lit up his face. He walked over to them and fingered the brownish rows. He remembered well how some of them had come to him. This copy of Bacon's "Novum Organum" had come from a little shop in the Rue du Bac and had cost him his dinner for a week. Charles was right when he said he would go without food to buy a book. And his hunger seemed delicious to him now. He had gone hungry too for "Several Treatises of Jacob Boehme" . . . how that book had intoxicated him!—it had sung in his head like summer and wine. He took it from the shelf, turning the musty pages. Would it sing to him now that his stomach was full, or was its music only for hungry boys? "So Mars clothes all his servants which love him and Saturn with his cloak, that they find only the copper of Venus, and not the gold which is in the copper; the spirit of the seeker enters into Sol, that is into pride, and supposes that he has Venus, when he has Saturn, which is covetousness. If he went forth in the dark water, that is in the resigned humility of Venus, the stone of the wise men would be revealed to him. . . ."