malignant monster. The tarantula weighed six pounds.
Dr. Poole took the skin to San Francisco and will have it tanned so
he can utilize it for the binding of one of his favorite books.

I have introduced Dr. Poole into this narrative because he was really
the dean of the interesting group of men who figured in Field's Saints'
and Sinners' Corner. Both Field and the venerable doctor had a slight
impediment in speech at the beginning of a sentence or in addressing
anyone. When they met after such a paragraph as the above had been
printed, Dr. Poole would blurt out in the most friendly way, "O-o-o-oh
Field! w-w-where did you get that lie from?" To which Field would
reply, "L-i-i-ie, d-doctor! W-w-why, F-f-fred Hild [Poole's successor
in the public library] g-g-gave me that!" Then the doctor would
ejaculate "Nonsense!" and the conversation would drift into some
discussion about books, in which all impediments of speech disappeared.

When McClurg's book-store was gutted by a fire some years ago, in which
the precious contents of the Saints' and Sinners' Corner were ruined
beyond restoration and the many associations that lingered around them
went up in smoke or were drowned out by water, the newspapers were
filled with all manner of stories about the Saints' and Sinners' Club
that had held its meetings there. The Rev. Dr. Gunsaulus, one of the
most widely known Saints, spoke of it as an association "without rules
of order or times of meeting." "It consisted," said he, in a published
interview, "of the most interesting group of liars ever assembled. For
ten years that Saints' and Sinners' Corner was a place where congenial
fellows met. We simply feasted our eyes on beautiful books or old
manuscripts and chatted with each other after the usual fashion of
book-lovers. The stories told were sometimes more amusing than
profitable." He also told how Field, on one occasion, saved a book
which he greatly coveted by writing on the fly-leaf:

_Swete friend, for Jesus's sake forbeare
To buy ye lake thou findest here,
For that when I do get ye pelf,
I meane to buy ye boke my selfe.

Eugene Field._

But the clergymen, doctors and merchants, actors and newspaper-men who
met by chance and the one common instinct of book-loving at McClurg's,
albeit "the greatest aggregation of liars" one of them had ever "met up
with," were a simple, ingenuous, and aimless lot compared to the group
which Field assembled in his corne