I have often sat on the chair, and when patience had inured me to the spines of the area I occupied, looked at the reflections in the mirror of those portraits, for they seemed more distant so, and in a perspective according to their age, and became really my grandparents, in a room, properly, of another world, which could be seen, but was not.  A room no one could enter any more.  I remember a black sofa, which smelt of dust, an antimacassar over its head.  That sofa would wake to squeak tales if I stood on it to inspect the model of a ship in yellow ivory, resting on a wall-bracket above.  There were many old shells in the polished brass fender, some with thick orange lips and spotted backs; others were spirals of mother-o’-pearl, which took different colours for every way you held them.  You could get the only sound in the room by putting the shells to your ear.  Like the people of the portraits, it was impossible to believe the shells had ever lived.  The inside of the grate was filled with white paper, and the trickles of fine black dust which rested in its crevices would start and run stealthily when people walked in the next room.  Over the looking-glass there hung a pair of immense buffalo horns, with a piece of curly black hair dividing them which looked like the skin of our retriever dog.  Above the horns was the picture of “The Famous Tea Clipper Oberon, setting her Studding Sails off the Lizard”; but so high was the print, and so faint—­for the picture, too, was old—­that some one grown up had to tell me all about it.

The clipper Oberon long since sailed to the Isle-of-No-Land-at-All, and the room in which her picture hung has gone also, like old Dockland, and is now no more than something remembered.  The clipper’s picture went with the wreckage, when the room was strewn, and I expect in that house today there is a photograph of a steamer with two funnels.

Nothing conjures back that room so well as the recollection of a strange odour which fell from it when its door opened, as though something bodiless passed as we entered.  There was never anything in the room which alone could account for the smell, for it had in it something of the sofa, which was old and black, and of the lacquered tea-caddy, within the lid of which was the faint ghost of a principle indefinably ancient and rare; and there was in it, too, something of the shells.  But you could never find where the smell really came from.  I have tried, and know.  A recollection of that strange dusky fragrance brings back the old room on a summer afternoon, so sombre that the mahogany sideboard had its own reddish light, so quiet that the clock could be heard ticking in the next room; time, you could hear, going leisurely.  There would be a long lath of sunlight, numberless atoms swimming in it, slanting from a corner of the window to brighten a patch of carpet.  Two flies would be hovering under the ceiling.  Sometimes they would dart at a tangent to hover in another place.