CHAPTER SIX The Sweet Spring Durinc the last days of the dying summer, and through- out the warm, wet winter that followed, tea with Theodore became a weekly affair. Every Thursday I would set out, my pockets bulging with matchboxes and test-tubes full of specimens, to be driven into the town by Spiro. It was an appointment that I would not have missed for anything. Theodore would welcome me in his study, a room that met with my full approval. It was, in my opinion, just what a room should be. The walls were lined with tall book- shelves filled with volumes on freshwater biology, botany, astronomy, medicine, folk-lore, and similar fascinating and sensible subjects. Interspersed with these were selections of ghost and crime stories. Thus Sherlock Holmes rubbed shoulders with Darwin, and Le Fanu with Fabre, in what I considered to be a thoroughly well-balanced library. At one window of the room stood Theodore’s telescope, its nose to the sky like a howling dog, while the sills of every window bore a parade of jars and bottles containing minute freshwater fauna, whirling and twitching among the delicate fronds of green weed. On one side of the room was a massive desk, piled high with scrapbooks, micro-photographs, X- ray plates, diaries, and note-books. On the opposite side of the room was the microscope table, with its powerful lamp on the jointed stem leaning like a lily over the flat boxes that housed Theodore’s collection of slides. The microscopes themselves, gleaming like magpies, were housed under a series of beehive-like domes of glass. ‘How are you?’ Theodore would inquire, as if I were a complete stranger, and give me his characteristic hand- shake - a sharp downward tug, like a man testing a knot ina rope. The formalities being over, we could then turn our minds to more important topics.