his own.

I crave--it may be a foolish whim, but I do crave--ocular evidence for
my belief that those books were written and were published. I want to
see them all ranged along goodly shelves. A few days ago I sat in one
of those libraries which seem to be doorless. Nowhere, to the eye, was
broken the array of serried volumes. Each door was flush with the
surrounding shelves; across each the edges of the shelves were
mimicked; and in the spaces between these edges the backs of books
were pasted congruously with the whole effect. Some of these backs had
been taken from actual books, others had been made specially and were
stamped with facetious titles that rather depressed me. `Here,'
thought I, `are the shelves on which Dencombe's works ought to be made
manifest. And Neil Paraday's too, and Vereker's.' Not Henry St.
George's, of course: he would not himself have wished it, poor fellow!
I would have nothing of his except SHADOWMERE. But Ray Limbert!--I
would have all of his, including a first edition of THE MAJOR KEY,
`that fiery-hearted rose as to which we watched in private the
formation of petal after petal, and flame after flame'; and also THE
HIDDEN HEART, `the shortest of his novels, but perhaps the loveliest,'
as Mr. James and I have always thought.... How my fingers would hover
along these shelves, always just going to alight, but never, lest the
spell were broken, alighting!

How well they would look there, those treasures of mine! And, most of
them having been issued in the seemly old three-volume form, how many
shelves they would fill! But I should find a place certainly for a
certain small brown book adorned with a gilt griffin between
wheatsheaves. THE PILGRIM'S SCRIP, that delightful though anonymous
work of my old friend Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel. And I should