he and Bock (the mustard-coloured terrier, named for Boccaccio)
would make the round of the shop, see that everything was shipshape,
empty the ash trays provided for customers, lock the front door,
and turn off the lights. Then they would retire to the den,
where Mrs. Mifflin was generally knitting or reading. She would
brew a pot of cocoa and they would read or talk for half an hour
or so before bed. Sometimes Roger would take a stroll along Gissing
Street before turning in. All day spent with books has a rather
exhausting effect on the mind, and he used to enjoy the fresh air
sweeping up the dark Brooklyn streets, meditating some thought
that had sprung from his reading, while Bock sniffed and padded
along in the manner of an elderly dog at night.

While Mrs. Mifflin was away, however, Roger's routine was
somewhat different. After closing the shop he would return
to his desk and with a furtive, shamefaced air take out from
a bottom drawer an untidy folder of notes and manuscript.
This was the skeleton in his closet, his secret sin.
It was the scaffolding of his book, which he had been compiling
for at least ten years, and to which he had tentatively assigned such
different titles as "Notes on Literature," "The Muse on Crutches,"
"Books and I," and "What a Young Bookseller Ought to Know."
It had begun long ago, in the days of his odyssey as a rural
book huckster, under the title of "Literature Among the Farmers,"
but it had branched out until it began to appear that (in bulk
at least) Ridpath would have to look to his linoleum laurels.
The manuscript in its present state had neither beginning nor end,
but it was growing strenuously in the middle, and hundreds
of pages were covered with Roger's minute script. The chapter on
"Ars Bibliopolae," or the art of bookselling, would be, he hoped,