them the breath of life, and he will go with cheerful inconsequence
from Chaucer, the jolliest of all book companions, and Rabelais--
although that brilliant satirist had pages which the bookman avoids,
because they make his gorge rise--to Don Quixote. If he carries a
Horace, Pickering's little gem, in his waistcoat pocket, and
sometimes pictures that genial Roman club-man in the Savile, he has
none the less an appetite for Marcus Aurelius. The bookman has a
series of love affairs before he is captured and settles down, say,
with his favourite novel, and even after he is a middle-aged married
man he must confess to one or two book friendships which are perilous
to his inflammable heart.

In the days of calf love every boy has first tasted the sweetness of
literature in two of the best novels ever written, as well as two of
the best pieces of good English. One is Robinson Crusoe and the
other the Pilgrim's Progress. Both were written by masters of our
tongue, and they remain until this day the purest and most appetising
introduction to the book passion. They created two worlds of
adventure with minute vivid details and constant surprises--the foot
on the sand, for instance, in Crusoe, and the valley of the shadow
with the hobgoblin in Pilgrim's Progress--and one will have a
tenderness for these two first loves even until the end. Afterwards
one went afield and sometimes got into queer company, not bad but
simply a little common. There was an endless series of Red Indian
stories in my school-days, wherein trappers could track the enemy by
a broken blade of grass, and the enemy escaped by coming down the
river under a log, and the price was sixpence each. We used to pass
the tuck-shop at school for three days on end in order that we might
possess Leaping Deer, the Shawnee Spy. We toadied shamefully to the
owner of Bull's Eye Joe, who, we understood, had been the sole