Lud-In-The-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

He had inherited from his father a fine legal library; and the book-shelves in his pipe-room were packed with volumes bound in vellum and old calf of edicts, codes, and trials, Some of them belonged to the days before printing had been introduced into Dorimare, and were written in the crabbed hand of old town-clerks. It made the past very real, and threw a friendly, humorous light upon the dead, to come upon, when turning those yellow parchment pages, some personal touch of the old scribe’s, such as a sententious or facetious insertion of his own – for instance, The Law bides her Time, but my Dinner doesn’t! or the caricature in the margin of some forgotten judge. It was just as if one of the grotesque plaster heads on the old houses were to give you, suddenly, a sly wink.