How small was Edward Forster's little parlour--how humble the furniture it contained!--a carpet, a table, a few chairs, a small China vase, as an ornament, on the mantel-piece.

How few were the objects brought to Amber's view in their small secluded home! The plates and knives for dinner, a silver spoon or two, and their articles of wearing apparel.

Yet how endless, how inexhaustible was the amusement and instruction derived from these trifling sources!--for these were Forster's books.
The carpet--its hempen ground carried them to the north, from whence the material came, the inhabitants of the frozen world, their manners and their customs, the climate and their cities, their productions and their sources of wealth.

Its woollen surface, with its various dyes--each dye containing an episode of an island or a state, a point of natural history, or of art and manufacture.
The mahogany table, like some magic vehicle, transported them in a second to the torrid zone, where the various tropical flowers and fruit, the towering cocoa-nut, the spreading palm, the broad-leaved banana, the fragrant pine--all that was indigenous to the country, all that was peculiar in the scenery and the clime, were pictured to the imagination of the delighted Amber.
The little vase upon the mantel-piece swelled into a splendid atlas of eastern geography, an inexhaustible folio describing Indian customs, the Asiatic splendour of costume, the gorgeous thrones of the descendants of the Prophet, the history of the Prophet himself, the superior instinct and stupendous body of the elephant; all that Edward Forster had collected of nature or of art, through these extensive regions, were successively displayed, until they returned to China, from whence they had commenced their travels.

Thus did the little vase, like the vessel taken up by the fisherman in the "Arabian Nights," contain a giant confined by the seal of Solomon--Knowledge.
The knife and spoon brought food unto the mind as well as to the body.
The mines were entered, the countries pointed out in which they were to be found, the various metals, their value, and the uses to which they were applied.