ion: he
was a book-collector and had learned more Greek than Robert the Third was
to acquire. He searched bookstalls on the way to the City in the morning,
and lay in wait for First Editions on the way home at night. When he had
a holiday, he went in search of a book. He sneaked books into the house,
and declared to his admonishing wife the next week that he had always
owned 'em, or that they were presented to him. The funds his father had
left him, his salary and "the perquisites," made a goodly income, but he
always complained of poverty. He was secretly hoarding sums so as to
secure certain books.

The shelves grew until they reached the ceiling, and then bookcases
invaded the dining-room. The collector didn't trust his wife with the
household purchasing; no bank-clerk ever does--and all the pennies were
needed for books. The good wife, having nothing else to do, grew anemic,
had neuralgia and lapsed into a Shut-in, wearing a pale-blue wrapper and
reclining on a couch, around which were piled--mountain-high--books.

The pale invalid used to imagine that the great cases were swaying and
dancing a minuet, and she fully expected the tomes would all come
a-toppling down and smother her--and she didn't care much if they would;
but they never did. She was the mother of two children--the boy Robert,
born the year after her marriage; and in a little over another year a
daughter came, and this closed the family record.

The invalid mother was a woman of fine feeling and much poetic insight.
She didn't talk as much about books as her husband did, but I think she
knew the good ones better. The mother and son moused in books together,
and Mrs. Orr is surely right in her suggestion that this love of mother
and son took upon itself the nature of a passion.

The love of Robert Browning for Elizabeth Barrett was a revival and a
renewal, in many ways, of the condition of tenderness and sympathy that
existed between Browning and his mother. There certainly was a strange and
marked resemblance in the characters of Elizabeth Barrett and the mother
of Robert Browning; and to many this fully accounts for the instant
affection that Browning felt toward the occupant of the "darkened room,"
when first they met.

The book-collector took much pride in his boy, and used to take him on
book-hunting excursions, and sometimes to the Bank, on which occasions he
would tell the Beef-Eaters how this was Robert Browning, the Third, and
that all th