re fixed wholly on the shelf--a man in
a slightly faded overcoat of mixed black and white, a man just past the
nimbleness of youth, whose head is plucked of its full commodity of hair.
It was myself. I admit the portrait, though modesty has curbed me short of
justice.

Doubtless, we have met. It was your umbrella--which you held villainously
beneath your arm--that took me in the ribs when you lighted on a set of
Fuller's Worthies. You recall my sour looks, but it was because I had
myself lingered on the volumes but cooled at the price. How you smoothed
and fingered them! With what triumph you bore them off! I bid you--for I
see you in a slippered state, eased and unbuttoned after dinner--I bid you
turn the pages with a slow thumb, not to miss the slightest tang of their
humor. You will of course go first, because of its broad fame, to the page
on Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and their wet-combats at the Mermaid. But
before the night is too far gone and while yet you can hold yourself from
nodding, you will please read about Captain John Smith of Virginia and his
"strange performances, the scene whereof is laid at such a distance, they
are cheaper credited than confuted."

In no proper sense am I a buyer of old books. I admit a bookish quirk
maybe, a love of the shelf, a weakness for morocco, especially if it is
stained with age. I will, indeed, shirk a wedding for a bookshop. I'll
go in "just to look about a bit, to see what the fellow has," and on an
occasion I pick up a volume. But I am innocent of first editions. It is
a stiff courtesy, as becomes a democrat, that I bestow on this form
of primogeniture. Of course, I have nosed my way with pleasure along
aristocratic shelves and flipped out volumes here and there to ask their
price, but for the greater part, it is the plainer shops that engage me. If
a rack of books is offered cheap before the door, with a fixed price upon a
card, I come at a trot. And if a brown dust lies on them, I bow and sniff
upon the rack, as though the past like an ancient fop in peruke and buckle
were giving me the courtesy of its snuff box. If I take the dust in my
nostrils and chance to sneeze, it is the fit and intended observance toward
the manners of a former century.

I have in mind such a bookshop in Bath, England. It presents to the street
no more than a decent front, but opens up behind like a swollen bottle.
There are twenty rooms at least, piled together with such confusion of
black