, square panes of
inferior glass; the familiar array of old books turn their mellow
title-pages toward the light; a window designed for lingering. Three
rows, or four, of books--and a few old prints--may be examined from the
front; these whet the appetite. But two other rows are so set in the
window as to necessitate sidelong inspection, and tempt the observer to
take two steps around the corner. Here, to be at ease, one must stand
with one foot on the first of the four stone stairs leading downward to
the door; stairs worn by the footfalls of four generations of
book-hunters. Just within the door one sees an alluring stack of books,
the topmost sustaining a neatly printed sign--"Sixpence--your choice."

In short--the foot once placed upon the first of these descending stairs
returns not to its fellow. A little bell rings, and one is inside.

Against the background of his overflowing shelves, with his
old-fashioned clothes, his stooping shoulders, his iron-gray hair, and
his firm, tender, and melancholy face,--you will never visit Samuel
Rowlandson's shop without wishing to frame him as he stands, and set him
in the window, among the other rare old prints.

He must have known you a long, long time to intrude a particular book
upon your notice; and then with the air of consulting a connoisseur
rather than suggesting a purchase. Yet he is a shrewd dealer. Not for
Samuel Rowlandson is the fairly marked price on the fly-leaf; nor even
hieroglyphics representing cost. A book is worth what it will fetch; and
every customer's purchasing power is appraised with discrimination,
concealed, indeed, but most effective.

The shop grows larger as your eyes become accustomed to the gloom of its
remoter part. There are four thousand books on those overweighted
shelves; all sorts and conditions of books; big folios and little
duodecimos, ragged books and books clothed by Riviere and Bedford. Once
he thought a Roger Payne binding had found its way to the shop, an
inadvertent bargain; but, alas! the encyclopaedia dashed his tremulous
hopes; years before the date on the title-page that seedy but glorious
craftsman had laid down his tools forever.

The shelves are catholic: Samuel Pepys, immortally shameless; Adam
Smith, shaken; Beaumont and Fletcher, in folio as they should always be
found; Boswell's Johnson, of course, but Blackstone's "Commentaries"
also; Plutarch's "Lives" and Increase Mather's witches; all of Fielding
in four stat