Simon and Richard followed the man through a narrow door in the thick wall, across a wide passage, and then along a narrow one. A door was thrown open, and they stepped into a solemn room. The floor of the hall was paved with great echoing slabs of stone, but now their feet sank in the deep silence of a soft carpet.

A new awe awoke in Richard. Around him, from floor to ceiling, ranged a whole army of books, mostly in fine old bindings. Their odour, however, was not altogether pleasing to Richard, whose practiced nose detected in it the faint signs of decay. The slight smell of decomposing paper, leather, paste, and glue was to Richard as the air of a poorly ventilated ward is to the nostrils of a physician. He had not seen Mr. Lestrange, half-hidden by a bookcase standing out from the wall.

“Good morning, Armour,” said Lestrange. “Your young man does not seem to relish books, judging from the look on his face.”

“In a grand place like this, sir,” remarked Richard, “such a library as I’ve never seen, except, of course, at the British Museum, makes a man sad to discover indications of neglect.”

“What do you mean?” returned Lestrange in displeasure.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, fearing he had been rude, “but I am a bookbinder.”

“Well?” rejoined Lestrange, taking him now for a sneaking tradesman on the track of a big job.

“I can tell at once the condition of an old book by the smell of it,” said Richard. “The moment I came in, I knew there must be some here in a bad way—not in their clothes merely, but in their bodies as well—the paper of them. Whether a man has what they call a soul or not, a book certainly has. A gentleman I know—but he’s a mystic—goes even further, and says the paper and binding is the body, the print the soul, and the meaning the spirit.”

Mr. Lestrange stared. He must be a local preacher, this blacksmith, this bookbinder, or whatever he was!

“I am sorry you think the books hypocrites,” he said. “They look all right.” He cast his eyes over the shelves before him.

“Would you mind me taking down one or two?” asked Richard. “My hands are rather black, but the colour is ingrained.”

“Do so, by all means,” answered Lestrange, curious to see how far the fellow could support with proof the accuracy of his scent.

Richard moved three paces and took down a volume—one of a set, the original edition in quarto of The Decline and Fall bound in russia-leather.

“I thought so!” he said. “Look at the joints of this Gibbon, sir. That’s always the way with russia—nowadays at least! Smell that, grandfather. The leather’s stone dead! These joints, you see, are gone to powder. All russia does sooner or later. That’s part of what you smell so strong in the room.”

Richard replaced the book and took down one after another of the same set.