pkeeper and a mulatto woman had got into a quarrel on the
pavement, and turning away to avoid them, I stumbled by accident into
the open door of a second-hand shop, where the proprietor sat on an old
cooking-stove drinking a glass of beer. As I started back my frightened
glance lit on a heap of dusty volumes in one corner, and in reply to a
question, which I put the next instant in a trembling voice, I was
informed that I might have the whole pile for fifty cents, provided I'd
clear them out on the spot. The bargain was no sooner clinched than I
gathered the books in my arms and staggered under their weight in the
direction of Mrs. Chitling's. Even for a grown man they would have made
a big armful, and when at last I toiled up to my attic, and dropped on
my knees by the open window, I was shaking from head to foot with
exhaustion. The dust was thick on my hands and arms, and as I turned
them over eagerly by the red light of the sunset, the worm-eaten
bindings left queer greenish stains on my fingers. Among a number of
loose magazines called _The Farmer's Friend_, I found an illustrated,
rather handsome copy of "Pilgrim's Progress," presented, as an
inscription on the flyleaf testified, to one Jeremiah Wakefield as a
reward for deportment; the entire eight volumes of "Sir Charles
Grandison"; a complete Johnson's Dictionary, with the binding missing;
and Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" in faded crimson morocco. When I
had dusted them carefully on an old shirt, and arranged them on the
three-cornered shelf at the head of my cot, I felt, with a glow of
satisfaction, that the foundations of that education to which President
had contributed were already laid in my brain. If the secret of the
future had been imprisoned in those mouldy books, I could hardly have
attacked them with greater earnestness; and there was probably no
accident in my life which directed so powerfully my fortunes as the one
that sent me stumbling into that second-hand shop on that afternoon in
mid-August. I can imagine what I should have been if I had never had the
help of a friend in my career, but when I try to think of myself as
unaided by Johnson's Dictionary, or by "Sir Charles Grandison," whose
prosiest speeches I committed joyfully to memory, my fancy stumbles in
vain in the attempt. For five drudging years those books were my
constant companions, my one resource, and to conceive of myself without
them is to conceive of another and an entirely diff