Hollister passed into the other room. This had been a bedroom, a
woman's bedroom. He guessed that by the remnants of fabric hanging
over the windows, as well as by a skirt and sunbonnet which still hung
from a nail. Here, too, was a bedstead with a rat-ruined mattress. And
upon a shelf over the bed was ranged a row of books, perhaps two dozen
volumes, which the rats had somehow respected,--except for sundry
gnawing at the bindings.
Hollister took one down. He smiled; that is to say, his eyes smiled
and his features moved a little out of their rigid cast. Fancy finding
the _contes_ of August Strindberg, the dramatist, that genius of
subtle perception and abysmal gloom, here in this forsaken place.
Hollister fluttered the pages. Writing on the flyleaf caught his eye.
There was a date and below that:
DORIS CLEVELAND--HER BOOK
He took down the others, one by one,--an Iliad, a Hardy novel, "The
Way of All Flesh" between "Kim" and "The Pilgrim Fathers", a volume of
Swinburne rubbing shoulders with a California poet who sang of gibbous
moons, "The Ancient Lowly" cheek by jowl with "Two Years Before the
Mast.
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