The whole company, armed with lamps and candles, betook themselves to a vast room on the ground floor, where furnaces, retorts, philosophical instruments, boxes, trunks, clothes bags, hat boxes and the famous steam-engine, formed a confused and entertaining spectacle.

The light played about this interior, as it appears to in certain pictures of the Dutch school.

It glanced upon the great yellow cylinders of the electric machine, struck upon the long glass bottles, rebounded from two silver reflectors, and rested, in passing, upon a magnificent Fortin barometer.

The Renaults and their friends, grouped in the midst of the boxes--some sitting, some standing, one holding a lamp, another a candle--detracted nothing from the picturesqueness of the scene.
Leon, with a bunch of little keys, opened the boxes one after another.
Clementine was seated opposite him on a great oblong box, and watched him with all her eyes, more from affection than curiosity.

They began by setting to one side two enormous square boxes which contained nothing but mineralogical specimens.