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In the course of reading for Greats, he had imbibed large draughts of the classics; had browsed widely on later literature, East and West; won the Newcastle, and filled a vellum-bound volume his mother's gift with verse and sketches in prose, some of which had appeared in the more exclusive weeklies. He had also picked up Hindustani from Dyán, and looked forward to tackling Sanskrit.
'Look here! said the minister, tapping the old vellum-bound book he held; 'in the first Georgic he speaks of rolling and irrigation, a little further on he insists on choice of the best seed, and advises us to keep the drains clear. Again, no Scotch farmer could give shrewder advice than to cut light meadows while the dew is on, even though it involve night-work.
Violence, indeed, did end it, and with humiliating detail. One day I sold my cloak to buy a book. That was a vellum-bound copy of the Sonnets of Cino of Pistoja, which, with my autograph, "Fr. Strelleius Pistoriae IV Kal. Aug. MDCCXXII," I still possess in my present retreat at Lucca.
He trod softly across the floor, hushing his footsteps, as though some one slept whom he feared to wake, and his eyes wandered from one familiar object to another till they rested on the shelves where the old vellum-bound books, which Innocent had loved and studied so much, were ranged in orderly rows.
But on this sacred side alone was there any entrance to his emotions. Fra Paolo was not speaking from the pulpit; he stood beside a table that had been placed in the nave, and the people gathered close about him, as children near a father, while he opened a great vellum-bound volume with massive golden clasps, which his secretary had brought from the library of the Servi.
For while one set of shelves contained row upon row of technical works, company reports, and all manner of business reference books bound in leather, on another were to be found the vellum-bound volumes of the Kelmscott Press. A sober note of grey or mole colour was the colour scheme of the room.
Of the quality of these documents, it is sufficient to say, that they were John Mill's; but, in respect to their quantity, it may be worth mentioning that a descriptive catalogue of them completely fills a small quarto volume of between three hundred and four hundred pages, in their author's handwriting, which now lies before me; also that the share of the Court of Directors in the correspondence between themselves and the Indian governments used to average annually about ten huge vellum-bound volumes, foolscap size, and five or six inches thick, and that of these volumes two a year, for more than twenty years running, were exclusively of Mill's composition; this, too, at times, when he was engaged upon such voluntary work in addition as his "Logic" and "Political Economy."
And the vellum-bound Tulpius, which I came upon in Venice, afterwards my only reading when imprisoned in quarantine at Marseilles, so that the two hundred and twenty-eight cases he has recorded are, many of them, to this day still fresh in my memory.
There was a shelf with a few vellum-bound books on it, and nothing else, not even a chair in the place. 'Yes; there they are! he said, as he took down one of the volumes from the shelf. 'This one comes to a close in the middle of the last century. I dare say there is something in this, now, that would be interesting enough to somebody. Who knows how many properties it might make change hands?
A great portion of his time was occupied in reading from a large vellum-bound book, but from time to time he laid it on one side to settle disputes which had arisen among some of his ten thousand followers, or to issue orders of the most emphatic and dogmatic character.
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