midnight
When the echo of her retreating footsteps died away , St. Elmo threw his cigar out of the window , and walked up and down the quaint and elegant rooms , whose costly bizarrerie would more appropriately have adorned a villa of Parthenope or Lucanian Sybaris , than a country-house in soi-disant `` republican '' America . The floor , covered in winter with velvet carpet , was of white and black marble , now bare and polished as a mirror , reflecting the figure of the owner as he crossed it . Oval ormolu tables , buhl chairs , and oaken and marquetrie cabinets , loaded with cameos , intaglios , Abraxoids , whose `` erudition '' would have filled Mnesarchus with envy , and challenged the admiration of the Samian lapidary who engraved the ring of Polycrates ; these and numberless articles of vertu testified to the universality of what St. Elmo called his `` world-scrapings , '' and to the reckless extravagance and archaistic taste of the collector . On a verd-antique table lay a satin cushion holding a vellum MS. , bound in blue velvet , whose uncial letters were written in purple ink , powdered with gold-dust , while the margins were stiff with gilded illuminations ; and near the cushion , as if prepared to shed light on the curious cryptography , stood an exquisite white glass lamp , shaped like a vase , and richly ornamented with Arabic inscriptions in ultra-marine blue -- a precious relic of some ruined Laura in the Nitrian desert , by the aid of whose rays the hoary hermits , whom St. Macarius ruled , broke the midnight gloom chanting , `` Kyrie eleison , Christe eleison , '' fourteen hundred years before St. Elmo 's birth . Immediately opposite , on an embossed ivory stand , and protected from air and dust by a glass case , were two antique goblets , one of green-veined agate , one of blood-red onyx ; and into the coating of wax , spread along the ivory slab , were inserted amphorae , one dry and empty , the other a third full of Falerian , whose topaz drops had grown strangely mellow and golden in the ashy cellars of Herculaneum , and had doubtless been destined for some luxurious triclinium in the days of Titus . A small Byzantine picture , painted on wood , with a silver frame ornamented with cornelian stars , and the background heavily gilded , hung over an etagere , where lay a leaf from Nebuchadnezzar 's diary , one of those Babylonish bricks on which his royal name was stamped . Near it stood a pair of Bohemian vases representing the two varieties of lotus -- one velvety white with rose-colored veins , the other with delicate blue petals .