By some slim chance, reader, you may be the kind of person who, on a visit
to a strange city, makes for a bookshop. Of course your slight temporal
business may detain you in the earlier hours of the day. You sit with
committees and stroke your profound chin, or you spend your talent in the
market, or run to and fro and wag your tongue in persuasion. Or, if you be
on a holiday, you strain yourself on the sights of the city, against being
caught in an omission. The bolder features of a cathedral must be grasped
to satisfy a quizzing neighbor lest he shame you later on your hearth, a
building must be stuffed inside your memory, or your pilgrim feet must wear
the pavement of an ancient shrine. However, these duties being done and the
afternoon having not yet declined, do you not seek a bookshop to regale
yourself?

Doubtless, we have met. As you have scrunched against the shelf not to
block the passage, but with your head thrown back to see the titles up
above, you have noticed at the corner of your eye--unless it was one of
your blinder moments when you were fixed wholly on the shelf--a man in
a slightly faded overcoat of mixed black and white, a man just past the
nimbleness of youth, whose head is plucked of its full commodity of hair.
It was myself. I admit the portrait, though modesty has curbed me short of
justice.

Doubtless, we have met. It was your umbrella--which you held villainously
beneath your arm--that took me in the ribs when you lighted on a set of
Fuller's Worthies. You recall my sour looks, but it was because I had
myself lingered on the volumes but cooled at the price. How you smoothed
and fingered them! With what triumph you bore them off! I bid you--for I
see you in a slippered state, eased and unbuttoned after dinner--I bid you
turn the pages with a slow thumb, not to miss the slightest tang of their
humor. You will of course go first, because of its broad fame, to the page