be going home that night, or he may object to carrying a parcel
in the subway, or for any other reason he will omit to take the book
with him. "The next day," says Cooper, "I pay Hobson a return visit, and
forget the book on his hall-table. Frequently Hobson may be too busy to
take notice of the accident. In that case I call him up on the telephone
as soon as I leave his house and ask in great agitation whether by any
chance I have left a volume of Maeterlinck on his hall-table. Sometimes
I add that Woolsey has been after that volume for weeks. That night, I
feel sure, Hobson will carry the book up to his bedroom."

And as Cooper spoke I thought of the Smith family, whom, by methods like
those I have described, Cooper succeeded in saving from themselves.
Nerves in the Smith family were badly rasped. The mother was not making
great headway in her social campaigns. Her husband chafed at his
children's idleness and extravagance. The children went in sullen
fashion about their own business. They had no resources of their own.
There was gloom in that household and stifled rancour, and the danger
of worse things to come, until the day when Cooper called and forgot at
one blow a copy of "Richard Feverel," the "Bab Ballads," and the third
volume of Ferrero's "Rome."

As I have said, Cooper was not blind to the good he was doing. False
modesty was not one of his failings. He would continually have me admire
his bookshelves. The books he was proudest of were those he had lent or
given away.... "I have a larger number of books missing," he would
boast, "than any man of my acquaintance. This big hole here is my
Gibbon. I sent it to an interesting old chap I met at a public dinner
some years ago. He was a prosperous hardware merchant, self-made, and,
like all self-made men, a bit unfinished. He had read very little. I
don't recall how I happened to mention Gibbon or to send him the set. I
think I may have forgotten the first volume at his office the next
morning. He devoured Gibbon. From him he went to Tacitus. He has since
read hundreds of books on the Roman empire and he has other hundreds of
volumes waiting to be read. But somehow he has never thought of sending
me back my shabby old Gibbon. And that was the way with my
Montaigne--gone. And here were two editions of Gulliver. I lent one to a
nephew of the Harringtons and the other to a rather prim young lady from
Boston who impressed me as having had too much Emerson. My Shelley