now, none, at least, who can repair our follies, and remove their baneful
effects by a friendly miracle. What miracle can restore the books we
borrow and lose, or the books we borrow and spoil with ink, or with
candle-wax, or which children scrawl or paint over, or which "the dog
ate," like the famous poll-book at an Irish election, that fell into the
broth, and ultimately into the jaws of an illiterate animal? Books are
such delicate things! Yet men--and still more frequently women--read
them so close to the fire that the bindings warp, and start, and gape
like the shells of a moribund oyster. Other people never have a paper-
knife, and cut the leaves of books with cards, railway tickets, scissors,
their own fingers, or any other weapon that chances to seem convenient.
Then books are easily dirtied. A little dust falls into the leaves, and
is smudged by the fingers. No fuller on earth can cleanse it. The art
of man can remove certain sorts of stains, but only by stripping the book
of its binding, and washing leaf by leaf in certain acids, an expensive
and dangerous process. There are books for use, stout, everyday
articles, and books for pious contemplation, original editions, or tomes
that have belonged to great collectors. The borrower, who only wants to
extract a passage of which he is in momentary need, is a person heedless
of these distinctions. He enters a friend's house, or (for this sort of
borrower thrives at college) a friend's rooms, seizes a first edition of
Keats, or Shelley, or an Aldine Homer, or Elzevir Caesar of the good
date, and hurries away with it, leaving a hasty scrawl, "I have taken
your Shelley," signed with initials. Perhaps the owner of the book never
sees the note. Perhaps he does not recognize the hand. The borrower is
just the man to forget the whole transaction. So there is a blank in the
shelves, a gap among the orderly volumes, a blank never to be filled up,
unless our amateur advertises his woes in the newspapers.

All borrowers are bad; but in this, as in other crimes, there are