" With the
ruin of his family before his eyes, or at least, let us say, the
disgraceful condition of the dining-room carpet, he intends to keep his
word, and for a whole fortnight will not allow himself to enter the
street of his favourite bookshop. Next week, however, business, so he
says at least, takes him down the street, but he remembers the danger,
and makes a brave effort to pass a public-house. The mischief of the
thing, however, is that there is another public-house in the street and
passing it whets the latent appetite, and when he is making a brave dash
past his own, some poor inebriate, coming out reluctantly, holds the door
open, and the smell is too much for his new-born virtue. He will go in
just for a moment to pass the time of day with his friend the publican
and see his last brand of books, but not to buy--I mean to drink--and
then he comes across a little volume, the smallest and slimmest of
volumes, a mere trifle of a thing, and not dear, but a thing which does
not often turn up and which would just round off his collection at a
particular point. It is only a mere taste, not downright drinking; but
ah me, it sets him on fire again, and I who had seen him go in and then
by a providence have met his wife coming out from buying that carpet,
told her where her husband was, and saw her go to fetch him. Among the
touching incidents of life, none comes nearer me than to see the
bookman's wife pleading with him to remember his (once) prosperous home
and his (almost) starving children. And indeed if there be any other as
entirely affecting in this province, it is the triumphant cunning with
which the bookman will smuggle a suspicious brown paper parcel into his
study at an hour when his wife is out, or the effrontery with which he
will declare when caught, that the books have been sent unbeknown to him,
and he supposes merely for his examination. For, like drink, this
fearsome disease eats into the very fibre of character, so that its
victim will practise tricks to obtain books in advance of a rival
collector, and will tell the most mendacious stories about what he paid
for them.

Should he desire a book, and it be not a king's ransom, there is no
sacrifice he will not make to obtain it. His modest glass of Burgundy he
will cheerfully surrender, and if he ever travelled by any higher class,
which is not likely, he will now go third, and his topcoat he will make
to last another year, and I do not say