contrast with this thick-witted multitude can I pride myself upon my
youth of endurance and of combat. I had a goal before me, and not the
goal of the average man. Even when pinched with hunger, I did not
abandon my purposes, which were of the mind. But contrast that starved
lad in his slum lodging with any fair conception of intelligent and
zealous youth, and one feels that a dose of swift poison would have been
the right remedy for such squalid ills.



XII.


As often as I survey my bookshelves I am reminded of Lamb's "ragged
veterans." Not that all my volumes came from the second-hand stall; many
of them were neat enough in new covers, some were even stately in
fragrant bindings, when they passed into my hands. But so often have I
removed, so rough has been the treatment of my little library at each
change of place, and, to tell the truth, so little care have I given to
its well-being at normal times (for in all practical matters I am idle
and inept), that even the comeliest of my books show the results of
unfair usage. More than one has been foully injured by a great nail
driven into a packing-case--this but the extreme instance of the wrongs
they have undergone. Now that I have leisure and peace of mind, I find
myself growing more careful--an illustration of the great truth that
virtue is made easy by circumstance. But I confess that, so long as a
volume hold together, I am not much troubled as to its outer appearance.

I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in
one from their own shelf. To me that is unintelligible. For one thing,
I know every book of mine by its _scent_, and I have but to put my nose
between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. My Gibbon, for
example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and
read and read again for more than thirty years--never do I open it but
the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of
that moment when I received it as a prize. O