unfingered tranquillity, for I
read from a handier, single volume. Only at cleaning times has he been
touched, and then but in the common misery with all my books. Against this
cleaning, which I take to be only a quirk of the female brain, I have
often urged that the great, round earth itself has been subjected to only
one flood, and that even that was a failure, for, despite Noah's
shrewdness at the gangway, villains still persist on it. How then shall my
books profitably endure a deluge both autumn and spring?

Thereafter, when the tempest has spent itself and the waters have returned
from off my shelves, I'll venture in the room. There will be something
different in the sniff of the place, and it will be marvelously picked up.
Yet I can mend these faults. But it does fret me how books will be
standing on their heads. Were certain volumes only singled out to stand
upon their heads, Shaw for one, and others of our moderns, I would suspect
the housemaid of expressing in this fashion a sly and just criticism of
their inverted beliefs. I accused her on one occasion of this subtlety,
but was met by such a vacant stare that I acquitted her at once. However,
as she leaves my solidest authors also on their heads, men beyond the
peradventure of such antics, I must consider it but a part of her
carelessness, for which I have warned her twice. Were it not for her
cunning with griddlecakes, to which I am much affected, I would have
dismissed her before this.

And now this Bell, which has ridden out so many of my floods, is
proclaimed to me a villain. We had got beyond the April freshets and there
was in consequence a soapy smell about. It is clear in my mind that a
street organ had started up a gay tune and that there were sounds of
gathering feet. I was reading at the time, in the green rocker by the
lamp, a life of John Murray, by one whose name I have forgotten, when my
eyes came on the sentence that has shaken me. Bell, it said, Bell of my
own bookshelf, of all the editors of Shakespeare was the worst.

In my agitation I removed my glasses, breathed upon the lenses, and
polished them. Here was one of my familiars accused of something that was
doubtless heinous, although in what particulars I was at a loss to know.
It came on me suddenly. It was like a whispered scandal, sinister in its
lack of detail. All that I had known of Bell was that its publication had
dated from the eighteenth century. Yet its very age had seemed a p