ricus, they go among
their peers; it is a pleasure to take them, from the dusty stall where
they were elbowed by plebeian school-books and battered odd volumes, and
give them Alduses and Elzevirs for companions.

Nothing remains but the Infirmary. The most painful subjects are the
unfortunates that have lost a cover. Bound a hundred years ago, perhaps,
and one of the rich old browned covers gone--what a pity! Do you know
what to do about it? I 'll tell you,--no, I 'll show you. Look at this
volume. M. T. Ciceronis Opera,--a dozen of 'em,--one of 'em minus half
his cover, a poor one-legged cripple, six months ago,--now see him.

--He looked very respectably indeed, both covers dark, ancient, very
decently matched; one would hardly notice the fact that they were not
twins.

-I 'll tell you what I did. You poor devil, said I, you are a disgrace
to your family. We must send you to a surgeon and have some kind of a
Taliacotian operation performed on you. (You remember the operation as
described in Hudibras, of course.) The first thing was to find a subject
of similar age and aspect ready to part with one of his members. So I
went to Quidlibet's,--you know Quidlibet and that hieroglyphic sign of
his with the omniscient-looking eye as its most prominent feature,--and
laid my case before him. I want you, said I, to look up an old book of
mighty little value,--one of your ten-cent vagabonds would be the sort of
thing,--but an old beggar, with a cover like this, and lay it by for me.

And Quidlibet, who is a pleasant body to deal with,--only he has insulted
one or two gentlemanly books by selling them to me at very low-bred and
shamefully insufficient prices,--Quidlibet, I say, laid by three old
books for me to help myself from, and did n't take the trouble even to
make me pay the thirty cents for 'em. Well, said I to myself, let us
look at our three books that have undergone the last insult short of the
trunkmaker's or the paper-mills, and see what they are. There may be
something worth looking at in one or the other of 'em.

Now do you know it was with a kind of a tremor that I untied the package
and looked at these three unfortunates, too humble for the companionable
dime to recognize as its equal in value. The same sort of feeling you
know if you ever tried the Bible-and-key, or the Sortes Virgiliance. I
think you will like to know what the three books were which had been
bestowed upon me gratis, that I mig