There is one very fine chair, but, heavens, not for sitting on; just to give the room a social standing in an emergency.  It sneers at the other chairs with an air of insolent superiority, like a haughty bride who has married into the house for money.  Otherwise the furniture is homely; most of it has come from that smaller house where the Wylies began.  There is the large and shiny chair which can be turned into a bed if you look the other way for a moment.  James cannot sit on this chair without gradually sliding down it till he is lying luxuriously on the small of his back, his legs indicating, like the hands of a clock, that it is ten past twelve; a position in which Maggie shudders to see him receiving company.

The other chairs are horse-hair, than which nothing is more comfortable if there be a good slit down the seat.  The seats are heavily dented, because all the Wylie family sit down with a dump.  The draught-board is on the edge of a large centre table, which also displays four books placed at equal distances from each other, one of them a Bible, and another the family album.  If these were the only books they would not justify Maggie in calling this chamber the library, her dogged name for it; while David and James call it the west-room and Alick calls it ‘the room,’ which is to him the natural name for any apartment without a bed in it.  There is a bookcase of pitch pine, which contains six hundred books, with glass doors to prevent your getting at them.

No one does try to get at the books, for the Wylies are not a reading family.  They like you to gasp when you see so much literature gathered together in one prison-house, but they gasp themselves at the thought that there are persons, chiefly clergymen, who, having finished one book, coolly begin another.  Nevertheless it was not all vainglory that made David buy this library:  it was rather a mighty respect for education, as something that he has missed.  This same feeling makes him take in the Contemporary Review and stand up to it like a man.  Alick, who also has a respect for education, tries to read the Contemporary, but becomes dispirited, and may be heard muttering over its pages, ‘No, no use, no use, no,’ and sometimes even ‘Oh hell.’  James has no respect for education; and Maggie is at present of an open mind.

They are Wylie and Sons of the local granite quarry, in which Alick was throughout his working days a mason.  It is David who has raised them to this position; he climbed up himself step by step (and hewed the steps), and drew the others up after him.  ‘Wylie Brothers,’ Alick would have had the firm called, but David said No, and James said No, and Maggie said No; first honour must be to their father; and Alick now likes it on the whole, though he often sighs at having to shave every day; and on some snell mornings he still creeps from his couch at four and even at two (thinking that his mallet and chisel are calling him), and begins to pull on his trousers, until the grandeur of them reminds him that he can go to bed again.  Sometimes he cries a little, because there is no more work for him to do for ever and ever; and then Maggie gives him a spade (without telling David) or David gives him the logs to saw (without telling Maggie).