The Flight of the Shadow | Page 6

house was originally the
out-lying cell of some convent. The signs on which he founded this
conclusion, I was never able to appreciate: to me, as containing my
uncle's study, the wonder-house of my childhood, it was far more
interesting than any history could have made it. It had very thick walls,
two low stories, and a high roof. Entering it from the court behind the
house, every portion of it would seem to an ordinary beholder quite
accounted for; but it might have suggested itself to a more
comprehending observer, that a considerable space must lie between

the roof and the low ceiling of the first floor, which was taken up with
the servants' rooms. Of the ground floor, part was used as a dairy, part
as a woodhouse, part for certain vegetables, while part stored the turf
dug for fuel from the neighbouring moor.
Between this building and the house was a smaller and lower erection,
a mere out-house. It also was strongly built, however, and the roof, in
perfect condition, seemed newer than the walls: it had been raised and
strengthened when used by my uncle to contain a passage leading from
the house to the roof of the building just described, in which he was
fashioning for himself the retreat which he rightly called his study, for
few must be the rooms more continuously thought and read in during
one lifetime than this.
I have now to tell how it was reached from the house. You could hardly
have found the way to it, even had you set yourself seriously to the task,
without having in you a good share of the constructive faculty. The
whole was my uncle's contrivance, but might well have been supposed
to belong to the troubled times when a good hiding-place would have
added to the value of any home.
There was a large recess in the kitchen, of which the hearth, raised a
foot or so above the flagged floor, had filled the whole--a huge
chimney in fact, built out from the wall. At some later time an oblong
space had been cut out of the hearth to a level with the floor, and in it
an iron grate constructed for the more convenient burning of coal.
Hence the remnant of the raised hearth looked like wide hobs to the
grate. The recess as a chimney-corner was thereby spoiled, for coal
makes a very different kind of smoke from the aromatic product of
wood or peat.
Right and left within the recess, were two common, unpainted doors,
with latches. If you opened either, you found an ordinary shallow
cupboard, that on the right filled with shelves and crockery, that on the
left with brooms and other household implements.
But if, in the frame of the door to the left, you pressed what looked like
the head of a large nail, not its door only but the whole cupboard turned
inward on unseen hinges, and revealed an ascending stair, which was
the approach to my uncle's room. At the head of the stair you went
through the wall of the house to the passage under the roof of the
out-house, at the end of which a few more steps led up to the door of

the study. By that door you entered the roof of the more ancient
building. Lighted almost entirely from above, there was no indication
outside of the existence of this floor, except one tiny window, with
vaguely pointed arch, almost in the very top of the gable. Here lay my
nest; this was the bower of my bliss.
Its walls rose but about three feet from the floor ere the slope of the
roof began, so that there was a considerable portion of the room in
which my tall uncle could not stand upright. There was width enough
notwithstanding, in which four as tall as he might have walked abreast
up and down a length of at least five and thirty feet.
Not merely the low walls, but the slopes of the roof were filled with
books as high as the narrow level portion of the ceiling. On the slopes
the bookshelves had of course to be peculiar. My uncle had contrived,
and partly himself made them, with the assistance of a carpenter he had
known all his life. They were individually fixed to the rafters, each
projecting over that beneath it. To get at the highest, he had to stand on
a few steps; to reach the lowest, he had to stoop at a right angle. The
place was almost a tunnel of books.
By setting a chair on an ancient chest that stood against the gable, and a
footstool on the chair, I could mount high enough to get into the deep
embrasure of the little window,