the eye the scenes in which they
took place long long ago. If any one in his early youth has experienced
some slight symptoms of the malady under discussion, which his
constitution, through a tough struggle with the world, and a busy
training in after life, has been enabled to throw off, he will yet look
back with fond associations to the scenes of his dangerous indulgence.
The auction-room is often the centre of fatal attraction towards it,
just as the billiard-room and the _rouge-et-noir_ table are to excesses
of another kind. There is that august tribunal over which at one time
reigned Scott's genial friend Ballantyne, succeeded by the sententious
Tait, himself a man of taste and a collector, and since presided over by
the great Nisbet, whose hand has dropped the ensign of office even
before the present lot has an opportunity of obtaining from it the
crowning honour. I bow with deferential awe to the august tribunal
before which so vast a mass of literature has changed hands, and where
the future destinies of so many thousands--or, shall it be rather said,
millions--of volumes have been decided, each carrying with it its own
little train of suspense and triumph.

More congenial, however, in my recollection, is that remote and dingy
hall where rough Carfrae, like Thor, flourished his thundering hammer.
There it was that one first marked, with a sort of sympathetic awe, the
strange and varied influence of their peculiar maladies on the
book-hunters of the last generation. There it was that one first handled
those pretty little pets, the Elzevir classics, a sort of literary
bantams, which are still dear to memory, and awaken old associations by
their dwarfish ribbed backs like those of ponderous folios, and their
exquisite, but now, alas! too minute type. The eyesight that could
formerly peruse them with ease has suffered decay, but _they_ remain
unchanged; and in this they are unlike to many other objects of early
interest. Children, flowers, animals, scenery even, all have undergone
mutation, but no perceptible shade of change has passed over these
little reminders of old times.

There it was that one first could comprehend how a tattered dirty
fragment of a book once common might be worth a deal more than its
weight in gold. There it was too, that, seduced by bad example, the
present respected pastor of Ardsnischen purchased that beautiful Greek
New Testament, by Jansen of Amsterdam, which he loved so, in the
fres