d voice, would ask for
"a young gentleman who had given an order to _their_ house." Looking out,
I should perceive a procession of carts and waggons, all advancing in
measured movements; each in turn would present its rear, deliver its cargo
of volumes, by shooting them, like a load of coals, on the lawn, and wheel
off to the rear, by way of clearing the road for its successors. Then the
impossibility of even asking the servants to cover with sheets, or
counterpanes, or tablecloths, such a mountainous, such a "star-y-pointing"
record of my past offences lying in so conspicuous a situation! Men would
not know my guilt merely, they would see it. But the reason why this form
of the consequences, so much more than any other, stuck by my imagination
was, that it connected itself with one of the Arabian nights which had
particularly interested myself and my sister. It was that tale, where a
young porter, having his ropes about his person, had stumbled into the
special "preserve" of some old magician. He finds a beautiful lady
imprisoned, to whom (and not without prospects of success) he recommends
himself as a suitor, more in harmony with her own years than a withered
magician. At this crisis the magician returns. The young man bolts, and
for that day successfully; but unluckily he leaves his ropes behind. Next
morning he hears the magician, too honest by half, enquiring at the front
door, with much expression of condolence, for the unfortunate young man
who had lost his ropes in his own zenana. Upon this story I used to amuse
my sister, by ventriloquizing to the magician from the lips of the
trembling young man--"Oh, Mr Magician, these ropes cannot be mine! They
are far too good; and one wouldn't like, you know, to rob some other poor
young man. If you please, Mr Magician, I never had money enough to buy so
beautiful a set of ropes." But argument is thrown away upon a magician,
and off he sets on his travels with the young porter--not forgetting to
take the ropes along with him.

Here now was the case, that had once seemed so impressive to me in a mere
fiction from a far-distant age and land, literally reproduced in myself.
For what did it matter whether a magician dunned one with old ropes for
his engines of torture, or Stationers' Hall with 15,000 volumes, (in the
rear of which there might also be ropes?) Should _I_ have ventriloquized,
would my sister have laughed, had either of us but guessed the possibility
that I myself