opened the letter, had forthwith passed his genial criticism on the
writer, and then, characteristically, forgetting all about it, turned
to the bearer as if he had been intimate with him from childhood.
And the feeling was mutual. Gaston in half an hour seemed to have
known his entertainer all his life.

In unimpeded talk with sincere persons of what quality soever--there,
rather than in shadowy converse with even the best books--the flower,
the fruit, of mind was still in life-giving contact with its root.
With books, as indeed with persons, his intercourse was apt to be
desultory. Books!--He was by way of asserting his independence of
them, was their very candid friend:--they were far from being [88]
an unmixed good. He would observe (the fact was its own scornful
comment) that there were more books upon books than upon any other
subject. Yet books, more than a thousand volumes, a handsome library
for that day, nicely representative not only of literature but of the
owner's taste therein, lay all around; and turning now to this, now
to that, he handled their pages with nothing less than tenderness: it
was the first of many inconsistencies which yet had about them a
singularly taking air, of reason, of equity. Plutarch and Seneca
were soon in the foreground: they would "still be at his elbow to
test and be tested": masters of the autumnal wisdom that was coming
to be his own, ripe and placid--from the autumn of old Rome, of life,
of the world, the very genius of second thoughts, of exquisite tact
and discretion, of judgment upon knowledge.

But the books dropped from his hands in the very midst of
enthusiastic quotation; and the guest was mounting a little turret
staircase, was on the leaden roof of the old tower, amid the fat,
noonday Gascon scenery. He saw, in bird's-eye view, the country he