I glanced at _Lives of the Lindsays_, by Lord Lindsay, a work of sixty-five years ago, unknown to me, quaint and delightful. This rubbed covers with Lockhart's _Life of Scott_. On another shelf I recall _The Colloquies of Edward Osborne, Citizen and Clothmaker of London_, which held me until I knew that the Colony House dog would get all of my dinner if I did not start homewards. The next volume to this was a friend, Thier's _The Consulate and the Empire_. Then I walked past stacks of old-fashioned novels, nearly all in three volumes. Their names were strange, and I suppose they would prove deadly reading to our generation; but I am sure that in their day they fascinated many eyes reading by the flickering light of tapers and rushes. And even now they stood bravely alongside Dickens and Scott.
Finally I reached up to the highest row and chose one of a series of heavy tomes whose titles had completely fallen away with age and climate. I untied the binding string, opened at random and read thus:--
"It is vain, then, any longer to insist on variations of organic structure being the result of habits or circumstances. Nothing has been elongated, shortened or modified, either by external causes or internal volition; all that has been changed has been changed suddenly, and has left nothing but wrecks behind it, to advertise us of its former existence."
Thus wrote the Baron Cuvier many years ago. And this brought me back to reality, and my study of those living fossils now asleep in the neighboring _bunduri_ thorn bushes, whose nestlings so completely refute the good baron's thesis.
As I reached the door I selected a volume at random to take back to Colony House. I put out the lights and turned a moment to look about. The platinum wires still glowed dully, and weak moonlight now filled the room with a silver grayness. I wondered whether, in the magic of some of these tropical nights, when the last ball had been pocketed and the last swizzle drunk belowstairs, some of the book-lovers of olden times, who had read these volumes and turned down the creased pages, did not return and again laugh and cry over them. There was no inharmonious note: no thrilling short stories, no gaudy chromatic bindings, no slangy terse titles, no magazines or newspapers. Such gentlefolk as came could have sat there and listened to the crickets and the occasional cry of a distant heron and have been untroubled by the consciousness of any passage of time.