III The Library
The 下一个 room Ember visited was to her a Heaven on Earth. An enormous room just for holding books! The ceiling was so high it would have taken ten of her standing on 最佳, 返回页首 of one another the reach it. The shelves and shelves of 图书 were piled right up to the 最佳, 返回页首 and there were several ladders placed conveniently so that she could reach the topmost books.
Ember walked round the room as though she were in a dream. She loved 阅读 and devoured every book she found but she had never had a whole 图书馆 full of them to herself. She barely knew where to start. Every square inch of 墙 and floor 太空 was piled high with the most beautiful expensive leather bound books.
“There must be every book in the world in here” she thought to herself in awe.
Slowly she made her way around the piles of 图书 until she found a copy of The Wind In The Willows which had been one of her favourite 图书 as a child but sadly her copy had been burnt to cinders. She looked around for somewhere to sit and saw a window 座位 of red velvet and she curled up there and began to read.
She read for hours her eyes flying down each beautifully illustrated page. When she had finished she was torn between her curiosity about the rest of the house and her longing to remain in the 图书馆 and read until her eyes fell out.
Then she remembered. Her bag! She flew along the corridor back to the nursery and grabbed a rucksack that contained all she owned in the world. Running back to the 图书馆 she emptied it out onto a nearby table.
An assortment of seemingly worthless objects tumbled out. The most valuable looking thing there was a 金牌 teardrop shaped brooch. It contained a picture of her mother and father and also one of her twin sister who had died along with them. Ember stared at them for a moment then snapped it shut and pinned it to her top.
The other objects were just things she had picked up throughout her life but they were just as important. A peacock’s feather, a green glass marble, an aquamarine gem, a single red rose pressed in an envelope, a diary of her mother’s she had managed to salvage from the house but she had never found the key, a shining silver stone that had been 给 to her 由 her father, and a drawing 由 her sister of the two of them together. Her sister had been a great artist before-
A tear fell down her cheek as Ember gazed at all these worthless treasures. Then touching the brooch for good luck she proceeded to fill the bag back up with 图书 after placing her treasures back in the front pocket.
She put The Wind in the Willows in her bag as well as The Wizard of Oz, Heidi, Black Beauty, The Railway Children, Alice In Wonderland, The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures Of 越橘, 哈克贝利 Finn.
The bag should have been overflowing at this point but strangely it still seemed almost empty and she managed to fit in a huge book of the entire works of the brothers Grimm.
Ember loved fairy tales even though she was now thirteen and the ones 由 the Brothers Grimm were her favourite.
She shouldered the rucksack and it felt light as a feather much to her surprise. She would have stayed and filled the bag some 更多 but her curiosity sent her feet across the room and right out the door.