metaphysician asks about his soul. Whence came they? Their value
depends a good deal on the answer. If they are stamped with arms,
then there is a book ("Armorial du Bibliophile," by M. Guigard)
which tells you who was their original owner. Any one of twenty
coats-of-arms on the leather is worth a hundred times the value of
the volume which it covers. If there is no such mark, the fancy is
left to devise a romance about the first owner, and all the hands
through which the book has passed. That Vanini came from a Jesuit
college, where it was kept under lock and key. That copy of Agrippa
"De Vanitate Scientiarum" is marked, in a crabbed hand and in faded
ink, with cynical Latin notes. What pessimist two hundred years ago
made his grumbling so permanent? One can only guess, but part of
the imaginative joys of the book-hunter lies ' in the fruitless
conjecture. That other question "Whither?" is graver. Whither are
our treasures to be scattered? Will they find kind masters? or,
worst fate of books, fall into the hands of women who will sell them
to the trunk-maker? Are the leaves to line a box or to curl a
maiden's locks? Are the rarities to become more and more rare, and
at last fetch prodigious prices? Some unlucky men are able partly
to solve these problems in their own lifetime. They are constrained
to sell their libraries--an experience full of bitterness, wrath,
and disappointment.

Selling books is nearly as bad as losing friends, than which life
has no worse sorrow. A book is a friend whose face is constantly
changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness,
and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the change
in yourself. As a man's tastes and opinions are developed his books
put on a different aspect. He hardly knows the "Poems and Ballads"
he used to declaim, and cannot recover the enigmatic charm of