Here was likewise his college
sofa; and about the walls were the portraits of his favorite butler,
old Joe Murray, of his fancy acquaintance, Jackson the pugilist,
together with pictures of Harrow School and the College at Cambridge,
at which he was educated. The bedchamber goes by the name of the Book
Cell, from its vicinity to the Rookery which, since time immemorial,
has maintained possession of a solemn grove adjacent to the chapel.
This venerable community afforded me much food for speculation during
my residence in this apartment. In the morning I used to hear them
gradually waking and seeming to call each other up. After a time, the
whole fraternity would be in a flutter; some balancing and swinging on
the tree tops, others perched on the pinnacle of the Abbey church, or
wheeling and hovering about in the air, and the ruined walls would
reverberate with their incessant cawings. In this way they would linger
about the rookery and its vicinity for the early part of the morning,
when, having apparently mustered all their forces, called over the
roll, and determined upon their line of march, they one and all would
sail off in a long straggling flight to maraud the distant fields.
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