me to-day. Besides, books are not only such good companions for what they
say, but for what they are. As with any other friend, you may go a whole
day with them, and not have a word to say to each other, yet be happily
conscious of a perfect companionship. The book we know and love--and, of
course, one would never risk taking a book we didn't know for a
companion--has long since become a symbol for us, a symbol of certain
moods and ways of feeling, a key to certain kingdoms of the spirit, of
which it is often sufficient just to hold the key in our hands. So, a
single flower in the hand is a key to Summer, a floating perfume the key
to the hidden gardens of remembrance. The wrong book in the hand, whether
opened or not, is as distracting a presence as an irrelevant person; and
therefore it was with great care that I chose my knapsack library. It
consisted of these nine books:

Mackail's "Georgics."
Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales.
Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Locke's "Beloved Vagabond."
Selections from R.L.S.
Pater's "Marius the Epicurean."
Alfred de Musset's "Premières Poésies."
Baedeker's "United States."
Road Map of New York State.

And, though my knapsack already weighed eighteen pounds, I could not
resist the call of a cheap edition of Wordsworth in a drug-store at
Warsaw, a charming little town embosomed among hills and orchards, where
we arrived, dreamy with country air, at the end of the day.