“...Gabriel was a traveller. Not of the pith helmet and bamboo stick variety, nor even of the Baedeker guide and Gladstone bag kind, but a traveller in the mind, scaling the mountains of learning created by historians and philosophers, scientists and poets and novelists. The books in Number Four King's Bench Walk were friends into whose warm embrace he fell every evening and who held him until bedtime at half-past midnight every night. Few knew of these travels, since Gabriel read not to acquire knowledge, nor to impart it, but simply because he could not help himself.”