put the finishing touches upon a piece of work, before entering upon the matter concerning which he had, as he put it, done himself the honor to ask me to confer with him.
"While I complete my work," said he, "look about you. Note well my friends of all ages, in whose company I have passed many busy years. They are 'the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time.' Around them, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, my pastime and my happiness have grown, Milton said: 'A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life,' and I have found it so. Browning wrote—and mark well that a hidden import lies in his words:
And the only men who speak aloud for future times to hear.'"
I availed myself of the opportunity to look about me, and as the charts seemed but a meaningless tangle of long and short lines of black and the three primary colors, parallel and interlacing, I betook myself to an inspection of the book-shelves, each plainly lettered with the class of its contents. I could see that the works
