Rabbi Saunderson | Page 8

boys boasted of the Rabbi's study as something that touched genius
in its magnificent disorderliness, and Carmichael was so proud of it that
he took me to see it as to a shrine. One whiff of its atmosphere as you
entered the door gave an appetite and raised the highest expectations.
For any bookman can estimate a library by scent--if an expert he could
even write out a catalogue of the books and sketch the appearance of
the owner. Heavy odour of polished mahogany, Brussels carpets,
damask curtains, and tablecloths; then the books are kept within glass,
consist of sets of standard works in half calf, and the owner will give
you their cost wholesale to a farthing. Faint fragrance of delicate
flowers, and Russia leather, with a hint of cigarettes; prepare yourself
for a marvellous wall-paper, etchings, bits of oak, limited editions, and
a man in a velvet coat. Smell of paste and cloth binding and general
newness means yesterday's books and a reviewer racing through novels
with a paper-knife. Those are only book-rooms by courtesy, and never
can satisfy any one who has breathed the sacred air. It is a rich and
strong spirit, not only filling the room, but pouring out from the door
and possessing the hall, redeeming an opposite dining-room from
grossness, and a more distant drawing-room from frivolity, and even
lending a goodly flavour to bedrooms on upper floors. It is distilled
from curious old duodecimos packed on high shelves out of sight, and
blows over folios, with large clasps, that once stood in monastery
libraries, and gathers a subtle sweetness from parchments that were
illuminated in ancient scriptoriums that are now grass-grown, and it is
fortified with good old musty calf. The wind was from the right quarter
on the first day I visited Kilbogie Manse, and as we went up the garden
walk the Rabbi's library already bade us welcome, and assured us of
our reward for a ten-miles' walk.
Saunderson was perfectly helpless in all manner of mechanics--he
could not drive a tack through anything except his own fingers, and had
given up shaving at the suggestion of his elders--and yet he boasted,

with truth, that he had got three times as many books into the study as
his predecessor possessed in all his house. For Saunderson had shelved
the walls from the floor to the ceiling, into every corner, and over the
doors and above the windows, as well as below them. The wright had
wished to leave the space clear above the mantelpiece.
"Ye'll be hanging Dr. Chalmers there, or maybe John Knox, and a bit
clock'll be handy for letting ye ken the 'oors on Sabbath."
The Rabbi admitted that he had a Knox, but was full of a scheme for
hanging him over his own history, which he considered both
appropriate and convenient. As regards time, it was the last thing of
which that worthy man desired to be reminded--going to bed when he
could no longer see for weariness, and rising as soon as he awoke,
taking his food when it was brought to him, and being conducted to
church by the beadle after the last straggler was safely seated. He even
cast covetous eyes upon the two windows, which were absurdly large,
as he considered, but compromised matters by removing the shutters
and filling up the vacant space with slender works of devotion. It was
one of his conceits that the rising sun smote first on an À'Kempis, for
this he had often noticed as he worked of a morning.
Book-shelves had long ago failed to accommodate Rabbi's treasures,
and the floor had been bravely utilised. Islands of books, rugged and
perpendicular, rose on every side; long promontories reached out from
the shore, varied by bold headlands; and so broken and varied was that
floor that the Rabbi was pleased to call it the Aegean Sea, where he had
his Lesbos and his Samos. It is absolutely incredible, but it is all the
same a simple fact, that he knew every book and its location, having a
sense of the feel as well as the shape of his favourites. This was not
because he had the faintest approach to orderliness, for he would take
down twenty volumes and never restore them to the same place by any
chance. It was a sort of motherly instinct by which he watched over
them all, and even loved prodigals who wandered over all the study and
then set off on adventurous journeys into distant rooms. The restoration
of an emigrant to his lawful home was celebrated by a feast, in which,
by a confusion of circumstances, the book played the part of the fatted

calf, being read afresh from beginning to end. During his earlier and
more agile years the