ed at once in the Triennial to find
them, for the epithet showed that they were probably students. I found
them all under the years 1771 and 1773. Does it please their thin ghosts
thus to be dragged to the light of day? Has "Stultus" forgiven the
indignity of being thus characterized?

The southeast chamber was the Library Hospital. Every scholar should
have a book infirmary attached his library. There should find a
peaceable refuge the many books, invalids from their birth, which
are sent "with the best regards of the Author"; the respected, but
unpresentable cripples which have lost cover; the odd volumes of honored
sets which go mourning all their days for their lost brother; the
school-books which have been so often the subjects of assault and
battery, that they look as if the police must know them by heart; these
and still more the pictured story-books, beginning with Mother Goose
(which a dear old friend of mine has just been amusing his philosophic
leisure with turning most ingeniously and happily into the tongues of
Virgil and Homer), will be precious mementos by and by, when children
and grandchildren come along. What would I not give for that dear little
paper-bound quarto, in large and most legible type, on certain pages of
which the tender hand that was the shield of my infancy had crossed out
with deep black marks something awful, probably about BEARS, such as
once tare two-and-forty of us little folks for making faces, and the
very name of which made us hide our heads under the bedclothes.

I made strange acquaintances in that book infirmary up in the southeast
attic. The "Negro Plot" at New York helped to implant a feeling in me
which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root out. "Thinks I to
Myself," an old novel, which has been attributed to a famous statesman,
introduced me to a world of fiction which was not represented on the
shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps by Coelebs in Search of a
Wife, or allegories of the bitter tonic class, as the young doctor that
sits on the other side of the table would probably call them. I always,
from an early age, had a keen eye for a story with a moral sticking out
of it, and gave it a wide berth, though in my later years I have
myself written a couple of "medicated novels," as one of my dearest and
pleasantest old friends wickedly called them, when somebody asked her if
she had read the last of my printed performances. I forgave the satire
for the c