crossing of the blood may make him impervious. For a father of this
kind will unconsciously inoculate his boy, allowing him to play
beside him in the bookroom, where the air is charged with germs
(against which there is no disinfectant, I believe, except commercial
conversation), and when the child is weary of his toys will give him
an old book of travels, with quaint pictures which never depart from
the memory. By and by, so thoughtless is this invalid father, who
has suffered enough, surely, himself from this disease, that he will
allow his boy to open parcels of books, reeking with infection, and
explain to him the rarity of a certain first edition, or show him the
thickness of the paper and the glory of the black-letter in an
ancient book. Afterwards, when the boy himself has taken ill and
begun on his own account to prowl through the smaller bookstalls, his
father will listen greedily to the stories he has to tell in the
evening, and will chuckle aloud when one day the poor victim of this
deadly illness comes home with a newspaper of the time of Charles
II., which he has bought for threepence. It is only a question of
time when that lad, being now on an allowance of his own, will be
going about in a suit of disgracefully shabby tweeds, that he may
purchase a Theophrastus of fine print and binding upon which he has
long had his eye, and will be taking milk and bread for his lunch in
the city, because he has a foolish ambition to acquire by a year's
saving the Kelmscott edition of the Golden Legend. A change of air
might cure him, as for instance twenty years' residence on an
American ranch, but even then on his return the disease might break
out again: indeed the chances are strong that he is really
incurable. Last week I saw such a case--the bookman of the second
generation in a certain shop where such unfortunates collect. For an
hour he had been there browsing along the shelves, his hat tilted
back upon his head that he might hold the books the nearer to his