第26章 THE ENIGMA STUDIED(3)

Not much was to be made out of this beyond the fact of wide scholarship,--more or less deep it might be,but at any rate implying no small mental activity;for he appeared to read very rapidly,at any rate exchanged the books he had taken out for new ones very frequently.To judge by his reading,he was a man of letters.But so wide-reading a man of letters must have an object,a literary purpose in all probability.Why should not he be writing a novel?

Not a novel of society,assuredly,for a hermit is not the person to report the talk and manners of a world which he has nothing to do with.Novelists and lawyers understand the art of "cramming"better than any other persons in the world.Why should not this young man be working up the picturesque in this romantic region to serve as a background for some story with magic,perhaps,and mysticism,and hints borrowed from science,and all sorts of out-of-the-way knowledge which his odd and miscellaneous selection of books furnished him?That might be,or possibly he was only reading for amusement.Who could say?

The funds of the Public Library of Arrowhead Village allowed the managers to purchase many books out of the common range of reading.

The two learned people of the village were the rector and the doctor.

These two worthies kept up the old controversy between the professions,which grows out of the fact that one studies nature from below upwards,and the other from above downwards.The rector maintained that physicians contracted a squint which turns their eyes inwardly,while the muscles which roll their eyes upward become palsied.The doctor retorted that theological students developed a third eyelid,--the nictitating membrane,which is so well known in birds,and which serves to shut out,not all light,but all the light they do not want.Their little skirmishes did not prevent their being very good friends,who had a common interest in many things and many persons.Both were on the committee which had the care of the Library and attended to the purchase of books.Each was scholar enough to know the wants of scholars,and disposed to trust the judgment of the other as to what books should be purchased,.

Consequently,the clergyman secured the addition to the Library of a good many old theological works which the physician would have called brimstone divinity,and held to be just the thing to kindle fires with,--good books still for those who know how to use them,oftentimes as awful examples of the extreme of disorganization the whole moral system may undergo when a barbarous belief has strangled the natural human instincts.The physician,in the mean time,acquired for the collection some of those medical works where one may find recorded various rare and almost incredible cases,which may not have their like for a whole century,and then repeat themselves,so as to give a new lease of credibility to stories which had come to be looked upon as fables.

Both the clergyman and the physician took a very natural interest in the young man who had come to reside in their neighborhood for the present,perhaps for a long period.The rector would have been glad to see him at church.He would have liked more especially to have had him hear his sermon on the Duties of Young Men to Society.The doctor,meanwhile,was meditating on the duties of society to young men,and wishing that he could gain the young man's confidence,so as to help him out of any false habit of mind or any delusion to which he might be subject,if he had the power of being useful to him.