The “King’s” instructions to me were that I was not to show my nose outside the house.  Possibly I might expose the tip of it once in a while, for a little exercise in the garden—­where all this time the little silver fountain went on playing amid the golden hush of the orange trees, filling the lotus flowers with big pearls of spray.  But, most of the day, I must regard myself as a prisoner, with the entire freedom of his study—­a large airy room on the second floor, well furnished with all manner of books, old prints, strange fishes in glass cases, rods, guns, pipe-racks, curiosities of every kind from various parts of the world—­India, the South Seas, Australia, not forgetting London and Paris—­and all the flotsam and jetsam of a far-wandered man, who—­as the “King” remarked, introducing their autobiographic display with a comprehensive wave of his hand—­had, like that other wanderer unbeloved of all schoolboys, the pious AEneas, been so much tossed about on land and sea—­vi superum, saevae memorem Junonis ob iram—­that he might found his city and bring safe his household gods from Latium.  Touching his hand lightly on a row of old quartos, in the stout calfskin and tarnished gold dear to bookmen, he said: 

“These I recommend to you in your enforced leisure.”

They were a collection of old French voyages—­Dampier and others—­embellished with copper-plate maps and quaint engravings of the fauna and flora of the world, still in all the romantic virginity of its first discovery.

“This,” he said, pointing to a stout old jar of Devonshire ware, “is some excellent English tobacco—­my one extravagance; and here,” pointing to a pipe-rack, “are some well-tried friends from that same ’dear, dear land,’ ‘sceptred isle of kings,’ and so forth.  And now I am going to leave you, while I go with Samson and Erebus on a little reconnoitring tour around our domains.”

So he left me, and I settled down to a pipe and a volume of Dampier; but, interesting as I found the sturdy old pages, my thoughts, and perhaps particularly my heart, were too much in the present for my attention long to be held by even so adventurous a past; so, laying the book down, I rose from my chair, and made a tour of inspection of the various eloquent objects about the room—­objects which made a sort of chronicle in bric-a-brac of my fantastic friend’s earthly pilgrimage, and here and there seemed to hint at the story of his strange soul.

Among the books, for example, was a fine copy of Homer, with the arms of a well-known English college stamped on the binding, and near by was the faded photograph of a beautiful old Elizabethan house, with mouldering garden walls, and a moat brimming with water-lilies surrounding it.  Hanging close by it, was another faded photograph, of a tall stately old lady, who, at a glance, I surmised must be the “King’s” mother.  As I looked at it, my eyes involuntarily sought the garden with its palms and its orange trees.  Far indeed had the son of her heart wandered, like so many sons of stately English mothers, from that lilied moat and those old gables, and the proud old eyes that would look on her son no more forever.