Their spirit was as high, their wit as keen, their laughter and their tears as contagious, as when their speech had whiled away the hours of a former century.

Lonely I was not and could not be more, with this goodly companionship, however wide the gulf of years that gaped between me and my old life.
"You are glad I brought you here," exclaimed Edith, radiant, as she read in my face the success of her experiment.

"It was a good idea, was it not, Mr.West?
How stupid in me not to think of it before! I will leave you now with your old friends, for I know there will be no company for you like them just now; but remember you must not let old friends make you quite forget new ones!" and with that smiling caution she left me.
Attracted by the most familiar of the names before me, I laid my hand on a volume of Dickens, and sat down to read.

He had been my prime favorite among the bookwriters of the century,--I mean the nineteenth century,--and a week had rarely passed in my old life during which I had not taken up some volume of his works to while away an idle hour.
Any volume with which I had been familiar would have produced an extraordinary impression, read under my present circumstances, but my exceptional familiarity with Dickens, and his consequent power to call up the associations of my former life, gave to his writings an effect no others could have had, to intensify, by force of contrast, my appreciation of the strangeness of my present environment.

However new and astonishing one's surroundings, the tendency is to become a part of them so soon that almost from the first the power to see them objectively and fully measure their strangeness, is lost.