ead or alive, sticks and stones and small shells
with their owners in 'em, living as comfortable as ever. Every one of
these caddice-worms has his special fancy as to what he will pick up
and glue together, with a kind of natural cement he provides himself,
to make his case out of. In it he lives, sticking his head and shoulders
out once in a while, that is all. Don't you see that a student in his
library is a caddice-worm in his case? I've told you that I take an
interest in pretty much everything, and don't mean to fence out any
human interests from the private grounds of my intelligence. Then,
again, there is a subject, perhaps I may say there is more than one,
that I want to exhaust, to know to the very bottom. And besides, of
course I must have my literary harem, my pare aux cerfs, where my
favorites await my moments of leisure and pleasure,--my scarce and
precious editions, my luxurious typographical masterpieces; my Delilahs,
that take my head in their lap: the pleasant story-tellers and the
like; the books I love because they are fair to look upon, prized by
collectors, endeared by old associations, secret treasures that nobody
else knows anything about; books, in short, that I like for insufficient
reasons it may be, but peremptorily, and mean to like and to love and to
cherish till death us do part.

Don't you see I have given you a key to the way my library is made up,
so that you can apriorize the plan according to which I have filled my
bookcases? I will tell you how it is carried out.

In the first place, you see, I have four extensive cyclopaedias. Out
of these I can get information enough to serve my immediate purpose on
almost any subject. These, of course, are supplemented by geographical,
biographical, bibliographical, and other dictionaries, including of
course lexicons to all the languages I ever meddle with. Next to
these come the works relating to my one or two specialties, and these
collections I make as perfect as I can. Every library should try to be
complete on something, if it were only on the history of pin-heads.
I don't mean that I buy all the trashy compilations on my special
subjects, but I try to have all the works of any real importance
relating to them, old as well as new. In the following compartment you
will find the great authors in all the languages I have mastered, from
Homer and Hesiod downward to the last great English name.

This division, you see, you can make almost as ext