for so much misery in human life.

I have made a study of these people, and I find that most of them are
bachelors whose state of singleness is due to the fact that the same
hesitancy which has deprived them of many a coveted volume has operated
to their discomfiture in the matrimonial sphere. While they
deliberated, another bolder than they came along and walked off with
the prize.

One of the gamest buyers I know of was the late John A. Rice of
Chicago. As a competitor at the great auction sales he was invincible;
and why? Because, having determined to buy a book, he put no limit to
the amount of his bid. His instructions to his agent were in these
words: "I must have those books, no matter what they cost."

An English collector found in Rice's library a set of rare volumes he
had been searching for for years.

"How did you happen to get them?" he asked. "You bought them at the
Spencer sale and against my bid. Do you know, I told my buyer to bid a
thousand pounds for them, if necessary!"

"That was where I had the advantage of you," said Rice, quietly. "I
specified no limit; I simply told my man to buy the books."

The spirit of the collector cropped out early in Rice. I remember to
have heard him tell how one time, when he was a young man, he was
shuffling over a lot of tracts in a bin in front of a Boston bookstall.
His eye suddenly fell upon a little pamphlet entitled "The Cow-Chace."
He picked it up and read it. It was a poem founded upon the defeat of
Generals Wayne, Irving, and Proctor. The last stanza ran in this wise:

And now I've closed my epic strain,
I tremble as I show it,
Lest this same warrior-drover, Wayne,
Should ever catch the poet.

Rice noticed that the pamphlet bore the imprint of James Rivington, New
York, 1780. It occurred to him that some time this modest tract of
eighteen pages might be valuable; at any rate, he paid the fifteen
cents demanded for it, and at the same time he purchased for ten cents
another pamphlet entitled "The American Tories, a Satire."

Twenty years later, having learned the value of these exceedingly rare
tracts, Mr. Rice sent them to London and had them bound in Francis
Bedford's best style--"crimson crushed levant morocco, finished to a
Grolier pattern." Bedford's charges amounted to seventy-five dollars,
which with the original cost of the pamphlets represented an
expenditure of seventy-five dollars and twenty-five cents upon M