do those bundles and
breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic
combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses and
prison vaults--it was a giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt
of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy.
They could not pass it by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a
place besieged; the shopmen, like the Jews rebuilding Salem, had a
double task. They kept us at the stick's end, frowned us down,
snatched each play out of our hand ere we were trusted with another;
and, incredible as it may sound, used to demand of us upon our
entrance, like banditti, if we came with money or with empty hand. Old
Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my eternal vacillation, once swept
the treasures from before me, with the cry: "I do not believe, child,
that you are an intending purchaser at all!" These were the dragons of
the garden; but for such joys of paradise we could have faced the
Terror of Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered was another
lightning glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like wallowing
in the raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare with it
save now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain
unwrit stones of adventure, from which I awake to find the world all
vanity. The _crux_ of Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the
uncertainty of the boy as he handled and lingered and doated on these
bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the sight and
touch of them which he would jealously prolong; and when at length the
deed was done, the play selected, and the impatient shopman had
brushed the rest into the gray portfolio, and the boy was forth again,
a little late for dinner, the lamps springing into light in the blue
winter's even, and _The Miller_, or _The Rover_, or some kindred drama
clutched against his side--on what gay feet he ran, and how he laughed
aloud in exultation! I can hear that laughter still. Out of all the
years of my life, I can recall but one home-coming to compare with
these, and that was on the night when I brought back with me the
_Arabian Entertainments_ in the fat, old, double-columned volume with
the prints. I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, I
remember, when my clergyman-grandfather (a man we counted pretty
stiff) came in behind me. I grew blind with terror. But instead of
ordering the book away, he said he envied me. Ah, well he might!

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