otmen, that the waters tasted like warm flat-irons. Finally, I viewed
the Crescent around which the shirted Winkle ran with the valorous Dowler
breathing on his neck. With such distractions, as you may well imagine,
Cornish pirates became as naught. Such mental vibration as I had was now
gone toward a tale of fashion in the days when Queen Anne was still alive.
Of a consequence, I again sought the bookshop and stifling my timidity, I
demanded such volumes as might set me most agreeably to my task.

I have in mind also a bookshop of small pretension in a town in Wales. For
purely secular delight, maybe, it was too largely composed of Methodist
sermons. Hell fire burned upon its shelves with a warmth to singe so poor a
worm as I. Yet its signboard popped its welcome when I had walked ten miles
of sunny road. Possibly it was the chair rather than the divinity that
keeps the place in memory. The owner was absent on an errand, and his
daughter, who had been clumping about the kitchen on my arrival, was
uninstructed in the price marks. So I read and fanned myself until his
return.

Perhaps my sluggishness toward first editions--to which I have hinted
above--comes in part from the acquaintance with a man who in a linguistic
outburst as I met him, pronounced himself to be a numismatist and
philatelist. One only of these names would have satisfied a man of less
conceit. It is as though the pteranodon should claim also to be the
spoon-bill dinosaur. It is against modesty that one man should summon all
the letters. No, the numismatist's head is not crammed with the mysteries
of life and death, nor is a philatelist one who is possessed with the
dimmer secrets of eternity. Rather, this man who was so swelled with
titles, eked a living by selling coins and stamps, and he was on his way
to Europe to replenish his wares. Inside his waistcoat, just above his
liver--if he owned so human an appendage--he carried a magnifying glass.
With this, when the business fit was on him, he counted the lines and dots
upon a stamp, the perforations on its edge. He catalogued its volutes, its
stipples, the frisks and curlings of its pattern. He had numbered the very
hairs on the head of George Washington, for in such minutiae did the value
of the stamp reside. Did a single hair spring up above the count, it would
invalidate the issue. Such values, got by circumstance or accident--resting
on a flaw--founded on a speck--cause no ferment of my desires.