One of his favorite books was a little green-covered volume,
printed on coarse paper, and smelling of the sea which it had crossed: a
book that seemed to bring one period of those past centuries up like a
pageant,--so vividly, with all the flying dust of their struggle in the
sunbeam before him, did its opulent vitality reproduce, in their
splendors and their sins, the actual presences of those dead men and
women, now more unreal substance than the dust of their shrouds. He
liked to carry this mediaeval Iliad round with him, and, taking it out
at propitious places, go jotting his pencil down the page. He had heard
it called an incomprehensible puzzle of poetry; it gave him pleasure,
then, to unriddle and proclaim it plain as print. He was thus
delectating himself one day, while Flor, still in her phase of
moodiness, stood behind Miss Agatha's chair; and, the passage pleasing
him, he read it aloud to Miss Agatha, whom, in the absence of his son,
her husband, he was wont to consider his opponent in the abstract,
however dear and precious in the concrete.
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