made a speedy end of the unique Bunyan and other rarities then on show.
I was allowed to see the Ruins on the following day, and by means
of a ladder and some scrambling managed to enter the Sale Room
where parts of the floor still remained. It was a fearful sight
those scorched rows of Volumes still on the shelves; and curious was it
to notice how the flames, burning off the backs of the books first,
had then run up behind the shelves, and so attacked the fore-edge
of the volumes standing upon them, leaving the majority with a
perfectly untouched oval centre of white paper and plain print,
while the whole surrounding parts were but a mass of black cinders.
The salvage was sold in one lot for a small sum, and the purchaser,
after a good deal of sorting and mending and binding placed about 1,000
volumes for sale at Messrs. Puttick and Simpson's in the following year.

So, too, when the curious old Library which was in a gallery
of the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, was nearly destroyed
in the fire which devastated the Church in 1862, the books
which escaped were sadly injured. Not long before I had spent
some hours there hunting for English Fifteenth-century Books,
and shall never forget the state of dirt in which I came away.
Without anyone to care for them, the books had remained untouched for
many a decade-damp dust, half an inch thick, having settled upon them!
Then came the fire, and while the roof was all ablaze streams
of hot water, like a boiling deluge, washed down upon them. The wonder
was they were not turned into a muddy pulp. After all was over, the
whole of the library, no portion of which could legally be given away,
was _lent for ever_ to the Corporation of London. Scorched and sodden,
the salvage came into the hands of Mr. Overall, their indefatigable
librarian. In a hired attic, he hung up the volumes that would bear it
over strings like clothes, to dry, and there for weeks and weeks were the