“As far as creature comforts go,” thought Hugh, “I have fallen on my feet.”  He rang the bell, had the tray removed, and then proceeded to examine the book-cases.  He found them to contain much of the literature with which he was most desirous of making an acquaintance.  A few books of the day were interspersed.  The sense of having good companions in the authors around him, added greatly to his feeling of comfort; and he retired for the night filled with pleasant anticipations of his sojourn at Arnstead.  All the night, however, his dreams were of wind and snow, and Margaret out in them alone.  Janet was waiting in the cottage for him to bring her home.  He had found her, but could not move her; for the spirit of the storm had frozen her to ice, and she was heavy as a marble statue.

When he awoke, the shadows of boughs and budding twigs were waving in changeful network-tracery, across the bright sunshine on his window-curtains.  Before he was called he was ready to go down; and to amuse himself till breakfast-time, he proceeded to make another survey of the books.  He concluded that these must be a colony from the mother-library; and also that the room must, notwithstanding, be intended for his especial occupation, seeing his bedroom opened out of it.  Next, he looked from all the windows, to discover into what kind of a furrow on the face of the old earth he had fallen.  All he could see was trees and trees.  But oh! how different from the sombre, dark, changeless fir-wood at Turriepuffit! whose trees looked small and shrunken in his memory, beside this glory of boughs, breaking out into their prophecy of an infinite greenery at hand.  His rooms seemed to occupy the end of a small wing at the back of the house, as well as he could judge.  His sitting-room windows looked across a small space to another wing; and the windows of his bedroom, which were at right-angles to those of the former, looked full into what seemed an ordered ancient forest of gracious trees of all kinds, coming almost close to the very windows.  They were the trees which had been throwing their shadows on these windows for two or three hours of the silent spring sunlight, at once so liquid and so dazzling.  Then he resolved to test his faculty for discovery, by seeing whether he could find his way to the breakfast-room without a guide.  In this he would have succeeded without much difficulty, for it opened from the main-entrance hall, to which the huge square-turned oak staircase, by which he had ascended, led; had it not been for the somewhat intricate nature of the passages leading from the wing in which his rooms were (evidently an older and more retired portion of the house) to the main staircase itself.  After opening many doors and finding no thoroughfare, he became convinced that, in place of finding a way on, he had lost the way back.  At length he came to a small stair, which led him down to a single door.  This he opened, and straightway found himself in the library, a long,