The
familiar faces of my books welcomed me. I threw myself in my reading-chair,
and gazed around me with pleasure. I felt it so homely here. All my old
friends--whom somehow I hoped to see some day--present there in the spirit
ready to talk with me any moment when I was in the mood, making no claim
upon my attention when I was not! I felt as if I should like, when the
hour should come, to die in that chair, and pass into the society of the
witnesses in the presence of the tokens they had left behind them.
I heard shouts on the stair, and in rushed the two boys.
"Papa, papa!" they were crying together.
"What is the matter?"
"We've found the big chest just where we left it."
"Well, did you expect it would have taken itself off?"
"But there's everything in it just as we left it."
"Were you afraid, then, that the moment you left it it would turn itself
upside down, and empty itself of all its contents on the floor?"
They laughed, but apparently with no very keen appreciation of the attempt
at a joke.
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