Arthur’s Reaction to Merlyn’s Library:

“It was the most marvelous room that he had ever been in… There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the bookshelves and some propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves… a guncase with all sorts of weapons which would not be invented for half a thousand years, a red-box ditto, a chest-of-drawers full of salmon flies which had been tied by Merlyn himself… a bunch of turkey feathers and goose-quills for making pens, an astrolabe, twelve pairs of boots, a dozen purse-nets, three dozen rabbit wires, twelve corkscrews, some ants’ nests between two glass plates, ink-bottles of every possible colour from red to violet, darning-needles, a gold medal for being the best scholar at Winchester, four or five recorders… plenty of cut glass, Venetian glass, Bristol glass and a bottle of Mastic varnish, some satsuma china and some cloisonné, the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica… two paint boxes (one oil, one watercolour,) three globes of the known geographical world, a few fossils… some glass retorts with cauldrons, bunsen burners, etc., and a complete set of cigarette cards depicting wild fowl by Peter Scott…”