t, after having changed its name to
Park's, to Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's, has
now become, for the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars, like
Stonehenge, are still afoot, the rest clean vanished. It may be the
Museum numbers a full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else her
gracious Majesty, may boast their great collections; but to the plain
private person they are become, like Raphaels, unattainable. I have,
at different times, possessed _Aladdin_, _The Red Rover_, _The Blind
Boy_, _The Old Oak Chest_, _The Wood Daemon_, _Jack Sheppard_, _The
Miller and his Men_, _Der Freischuetz_, _The Smuggler_, _The Forest of
Bondy_, _Robin Hood_, _The Waterman_, _Richard I._, _My Poll and my
Partner Joe_, _The Inchcape Bell_ (imperfect), and _Three-Fingered
Jack, the Terror of Jamaica_; and I have assisted others in the
illumination of _The Maid of the Inn_ and _The Battle of Waterloo_. In
this roll-call of stirring names you read the evidences of a happy
childhood; and though not half of them are still to be procured of any
living stationer, in the mind of their once happy owner all survive,
kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past.

There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain
stationer's shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins the
city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we made a
party to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those
days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of
itself had been enough to hallow it. But there was more than that. In
the Leith Walk window, all the year round, there stood displayed a
theatre in working order, with a "forest set," a "combat," and a few
"robbers carousing" in the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold
to me! the plays themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one
upon another. Long and often have I lingered there with empty pockets.
One figure, we shall say, was visible in the first plate of
characters, bearded, pistol in hand, or drawing to his ear the
clothyard arrow; I would spell the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom
Coffin, or Grindoff, 2d dress? O, how I would long to see the rest!
how--if the name by chance were hidden--I would wonder in what play he
figured, and what immortal legend justified his attitude and strange
apparel! And then to go within, to announce yourself as an intending
purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to un