l used book-plates. The
plates most familiar to students in old libraries in New England are
those of the Vaughans and of Isaiah Thomas.

Another, a living interest is found in these old, dusty, leather-bound
volumes, which is not in the inscriptions and not, alas, in the printed
words. They are the chosen home of a race of pigmy spiderlings who love
musty theology with an affection found in no one else nowadays. In these
dingy homes they live and rear their hideous little progeny: for in the
cold light of a microscope these tiny brown book-dwellers are not
beautiful; they are flat, crab-like, goggle-eyed, hairy; and they zigzag
across the page on their ugly crooked legs in a sprawling, drunken
fashion. They do not eat the books; they live apparently on air; yet if
you crush them between the pages they leave a stain of vivid scarlet to
reproach you in future readings for your needless cruelty. I cannot kill
them; though flaming is their blood's rebuke, it is aristocratically as
well as theologically blue. In their veins runs the ichor--arachnidian
though it be--that came over in the Mayflower; yes, doubly honored, came
over in the special stateroom of an Ainsworth's Psalm-Book or a Genevan
Bible. No degrading alliances, no admixtures through foreign emigration,
have crossed that pure inbred strain; my book-spiders are of real
Pilgrim stock--they are true New England Brahmins.

Any one who turns over with attention the books of an old New England
library must be struck with a sense of the affection with which these
books have been treasured, the care with which they have been read, and,
in case of accident, with which they have been repaired. One psalm-book,
nibbled by mice, has had every page neatly mended by the insertion of
thin sheets of paper to replace the lost bits; and some painstaking and
pious New Englander, with a pen and skill worthy the illuminating monks
of another faith, has minutely printed the missing letters on both sides
of the inserted slip in a text no larger than the surrounding print.
Another book, a Bible, burnt in round holes by a slow-burning coal from
the pipe of a sleepy reader, has been mended in the same careful manner.
I have seen Bibles that have been read and turned over till the margins
of the pages at the lower corner and outer edge were worn off down to
the print by loving daily use. In one such the margins had been neatly
replaced by pasted slips of paper. In more than one book I have