Lilith: A Romance

ng definitely the management of the estate. My father died when I was yet a child; my mother fol

esultory fashion, to the physical sciences. It was chiefly the wonder they woke that drew me. I was constantly seeing, and on the outlook to see, strange analogies, not only between the facts of different sciences of the same order, or between physical and metaphysical facts, but betwee

efore the invention of printing, and had continued to my own time, greatly influenced, of course, by changes of taste and pursuit. Nothing surely can more impress upon a man the tr

her until it occupied the greater part of the ground floor. Its chief room was large, and the walls of it were covered with books almost to the ceiling; the rooms in

mind in relation to supposed knowledge was what most of all interested me. Ptolemy, Dante, the two Bacons, and Boyl

y eye was caught by the same glory on the one picture in the room-a portrait, in a sort of niche or little shrine sunk for it in the expanse of book-filled shelves. I knew it as the likeness of one of my ancestors, but had never even wondered why it hung there alone, and not in the gallery, or one of the great rooms, among the other family portraits. The direct sunlight brought out the painting wonderfully; for the first time I seemed to see i

und but a gap in the row where it ought to have stood, and the same instant remembered that just there I had seen, or fancied I saw, the old man in search of a book. I looked al

nother and yet odde

frame, and it had been the fancy of some ancestor to cross it with shallow shelves, filled with book-backs only. The harmless trick may be excused by the fac

n it and the bottom of the next shelf: he had cut away diagonally a considerable portion, and fixed the remnant with one of its open corners projecting beyo

th I knew in it justified, I rang the bell, and the butler appeared. When I asked him if he knew what had befallen it, he turned pale, and assured me he did not. I could less easily doubt his

er old man, in a long, dark coat, shiny as from much wear, in the act of disappearing through the masked door into the closet beyond. I darted across the room, found the door shut, pulled it o

e myself that I was indeed alone, started again to my feet, and ran to the masked door-for there

e bell; the butler came; I told him all

t myself had seen him. He had heard a good deal about him when first he served in the house, b

ed by an old gentlem

t the fact that I had never heard of it seemed to impl

to what he had seen

g that whoever alluded to it should be dismissed without a moment's warning: it was nothing but a pretext of the maids, he said, for running into the arms of the men! but o

, but of strange, forbidden, and evil books; and in so doing, Mr. Raven, who was probably the devil himself, encouraged him. Suddenly they both disappeared, and Sir Upward was never after seen or heard of, but Mr. Raven continued to show himself at uncertain

himself privileged in regard to the books. How the old woman had learned so much about him he coul

on the part of the old gentleman!"

saying nothing about him to the servants. Then I asked him if he had ever seen the mutilated volume out of its place; he answ