He recalled that he had often held the conceit that the essential characters of these ancient writers, the ghostly presence of the men themselves, had in the passing years settled on this room and late at night, when all else was quiet, he had often found himself conversing with these olden men, who emerged from the dust of the past into the shadow of the present.

The tier of books ran all around the room, broken only by two doors and, on the river side, three windows. When the first tier ended a balcony began, guarded by decorative metal railing, and on the balcony the second tier of books went all around the room. Above one of the doors a clock was mounted on the wall and for more than five thousand years, he reminded himself in wonder, the clock had kept on ticking, beating off the seconds century on century. The clock said 9:15 and how near, he wondered, was that to the correctness of the time as set up by men so many years ago. There was, he realized, no way that one might know, although it did not matter now. The world would be as well off if there were no clock.

Muffled sounds made their way into the room— the mournful lowing of a distant cow, the nearby barking of a dog, the insane cackling of a hen. The music trees still were silent—they'd not start tuning up until sometime in the afternoon. He wondered if they'd try one of the new compositions tonight. There had, of late, been a lot of them. If so, he hoped it would not be one of the experimental ones they had been trying lately. There were so many others they might play, so many of the old and favorite ones, but there was no sense to what they did. It seemed, he told himself, that it had been getting worse in the last few years since two of the older trees had shown some sign of dying. They had begun to lose some of their branches and each spring it seemed that their leaf output was smaller.