of musty
turn, who would sit apart, there is something to be said for the
repair of violins and 'cellos. At the least he sweetens discord into
melody.

But I would not willingly keep a second-hand bookshop. It is too
cluttered a business. There is too free a democracy between good and
bad. It was Dean Swift who declared that collections of books made him
melancholy, "where the best author is as much squeezed and as obscure
as a porter at a coronation." Nor is it altogether reassuring for one
who is himself by way of being an author to view the certain neglect
that awaits him when attics are cleared at last. There is too leathery
a smell upon the premises, a thick deposit of mortality. I draw a deep
breath when I issue on the street, grateful for the sunlight and the
wind. However, I frequently put my head in at Pratt's around the
corner, sometimes by chance when the family are assembled for their
supper in one of the book alcoves. They have swept back a litter of
historians to make room for the tray of dishes. To cut them from the
shop they have drawn a curtain in front of their nook, but I can hear
the teapot bubbling on the counter. There is, also, a not unsavory
smell which, if my old nose retains its cunning, is potato stew,
fetched up from the kitchen. If you seek Gibbon now, Pratt's face will
show like a withered moon between the curtains and will request you to
call later when the dishes have been cleared.

No one works in cleaner produce than carpenters. They are for the most
part a fatherly whiskered tribe and they eat their lunches neatly from
a pail, their backs against the wall, their broad toes upturned. I
look suspiciously on painters, however, who present themselves for
work like slopped and shoddy harlequins, and although I have myself
passed a delightful afternoon painting a wooden fence at the foot of
the garden--and been scraped afterwards--I would not wish to be of
their craft.

But perhaps one is of restless habit and a peripatetic occupation may
be recommended. For a bachelor of small expense, at a hazard, a
wandering fruit and candy cart offers the venture and chance of
unfamiliar journeys. There is a breed of lollypop on a stick that
shows a handsome profit when the children come from school. Also, at
this minute, I hear below me on the street the flat bell of the
scissors-grinder. I know not what skill is required, yet it needs a
pretty eye and even foot. The ragman takes to an ancestral bu