With this guilty secret in me I blushed as I asked the question. It seemed
sure that the shopkeeper must guess my purpose. I felt myself suspected as
though I were a rascal buying pistols to commit a murder. Indeed, I seem
to remember having read that even hardened criminals have become confused
before a shopkeeper and betrayed themselves. Of course, Dick Turpin and
Jerry Abershaw could call for pistols in the same easy tone they ordered
ale, but it would take a practiced villainy. But I in my innocence wanted
nothing but the meager outline of a pirate's life, which I might fatten to
my uses.

But on a less occasion, when there is no plot thumping in me, I still feel
a kind of embarrassment when I ask for a book out of the general demand. I
feel so like an odd stick. This embarrassment applies not to the request
for other commodities. I will order a collar that is quite outside the
fashion, in a high-pitched voice so that the whole shop can hear. I could
bargain for a purple waistcoat--did my taste run so--and though the
sidewalk listened, it would not draw a blush. I have traded even for
women's garments--though this did strain me--without an outward twitch.
Finally, to top my valor, I have bought sheet music of the lighter kind and
have pronounced the softest titles so that all could hear. But if I desire
the poems of Lovelace or the plays of Marlowe, I sidle close up to the
shopkeeper to get his very ear. If the book is visible, I point my thumb at
it without a word.

It was but the other day--in order to fill a gap in a paper I was
writing--I desired to know the name of an author who is obscure although
his work has been translated into nearly all languages. I wanted to know a
little about the life of the man who wrote _Mary Had a Little Lamb_, which,
I am told, is known by children over pretty much all the western world. It