“Books,” Julian said promptly, before Sam or I could answer.

“Books! Ordinarily, I set aside books for the Dominion Conservator…”

“The boy is a Comstock,” Sam said. “I don’t suppose you mean to balk him.” The Tipman reddened. “No, not at all… in fact we came across something in our digging… a sort of library in miniature… I’ll show you, if you like.”

This was intriguing, especially to Julian, who beamed as if he had been invited to a Christmas party. We followed the stout Tipman to a freshly-arrived canvasback wagon, from which a laborer was tossing bundled piles into a stack beside a tent.

These twine-wrapped bales were books… old, tattered, and wholly free of the Dominion Stamp of Approval. They must have been more than a century old; for although they were faded they had obviously once been colorful and expensively printed, not made of stiff brown paper like the Charles Curtis Easton books of modern times. They had not even rotted much. Their smell, under the cleansing Athabaska sunlight, was inoffensive.

“Sam!” Julian whispered. He had already drawn his knife and was slicing through the twine.

“Calm down,” suggested Sam, who was not an enthusiast like Julian.

“Oh, but—Sam! We should have brought a cart!”

“We can’t carry away armloads, Julian, nor would we ever have been allowed to. The Dominion scholars will have all this. Though perhaps you can get away with a volume or two.” The Tipman said, “These are from Lundsford.” Lundsford was the name of a ruined town thirty or so miles to the southeast. The Tipman leaned toward Sam Godwin, who was his own age, and said: “We thought Lundsford had been mined out a decade ago. But even a dry well may freshen. One of my workers spotted a low place off the main excavations—a sort of sink-hole: the recent rain had cut it through. Once a basement or warehouse of some kind. Oh, sir, we found good china there, and glasswork, and many more books than this… most were mildewed, but some had been protected under a kind of stiff oilcoth, and were lodged beneath a partially-collapsed ceiling… there had been a fire, but they survived it…”