dered
ale, but it would take a practiced villainy. But I in my innocence wanted
nothing but the meager outline of a pirate's life, which I might fatten to
my uses.

But on a less occasion, when there is no plot thumping in me, I still feel
a kind of embarrassment when I ask for a book out of the general demand. I
feel so like an odd stick. This embarrassment applies not to the request
for other commodities. I will order a collar that is quite outside the
fashion, in a high-pitched voice so that the whole shop can hear. I could
bargain for a purple waistcoat--did my taste run so--and though the
sidewalk listened, it would not draw a blush. I have traded even for
women's garments--though this did strain me--without an outward twitch.
Finally, to top my valor, I have bought sheet music of the lighter kind and
have pronounced the softest titles so that all could hear. But if I desire
the poems of Lovelace or the plays of Marlowe, I sidle close up to the
shopkeeper to get his very ear. If the book is visible, I point my thumb at
it without a word.

It was but the other day--in order to fill a gap in a paper I was
writing--I desired to know the name of an author who is obscure although
his work has been translated into nearly all languages. I wanted to know a
little about the life of the man who wrote _Mary Had a Little Lamb_, which,
I am told, is known by children over pretty much all the western world. It
needed only a trip to the Public Library. Any attendant would direct me to
the proper shelf. Yet once in the building, my courage oozed. My question,
though serious, seemed too ridiculous to be asked. I would sizzle as I
met the attendant's eye. Of a consequence, I fumbled on my own devices,
possibly to the increase of my general knowledge, but without gaining what
I sought.

They had no book in the Bath shop on piracy in Cornwall. I was offered
instead a work in two volumes on the notorious highwaymen of history, and
for a moment my plot swerved in that direction. But I put it by. To pay the
fellow for his pains--for he had dug in barrels to his shoulders and had a
smudge across his nose--I bought a copy of Thomson's "Castle of Indolence,"
and in my more energetic moods I read it. And so I came away.

On leaving the shop, lest I should be nipped in a neglect, I visited the
Roman baths. Then I took the waters in the Assembly Room. It was Sam
Weller, you may recall, who remarked, when he was entertained by the select
fo