1 have been spending th few days of the summer hol by tackling the long: postponed teak of weeding out. dt iv a melancholy business, for though I badly need more space I would rather, to invert the vulgar saying, have books' company than their room. Many of them I have not opened for adeeade, many I shall probably never open again, but the very sight of a familiar cloth back upon the shelves is a pleasant thing, like a known and loved face; it is the necessary concomitant of the cheering picture of the armchair drawn forward to the glow, the ready slippers, the cosy nook, There something almost mean about throw. ing out an accustomed volume—it is as harrowing as drowning kittens. 1 pulled out to-day a thin book which T picked up (that slipped out quite unintentionally) on the barrows, when T was an impecunious undergraduate, and over my mind there came a rush of memories, like an unfolding reel of pictures: the thrill and hurry of the spirit in me as these pages opened up a new and enchanted world, the scream of a G. & S. W. engine on the bridge beneath which the motley crowd, intent on bargains, surged round the barrows, the yellow flare of an early paraffin lamp, and the black, smooth river behind the railings, T was a frequent customer of that open-air bibliopolis, and for a few coppers I amassed slab-sided tomes replete with information both academie and otherwise. The first copy of Liddell and Scott 1 ever owned was a respectable though faded survivor of the fourth edition; it cost fourpence, did more than its rightful share in the fabrication Of those mosaics, my Greek proses, and finally passed to a less fortanate brother when, one lucky day, the same barrow provided at aa equally low figure a copy of the famous "figment" edition. There, too, I picked up (the phrase is inevitable!) one book I do not mean to weed out, a tattered, half-calf volume, the product of the German press of the early, forties, sporting quite ostensatiously on the virgin back of the Carlyle. It was a hurried sale—T, at least, hurried it, fearful that the scrutiny of the barrow-man would fetch tay excitement and unearth its cause,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.