half-way down it shine as if it were really that Mountain of
Piety that the French poetic instinct has named it; it made the
mean pseudo-French bookshop, next but one to it, a shop packed
with dreary indecency, show for a moment a kind of Parisian
colour. And the shop that stood between the pawnshop and the shop
of dreary indecency, showed with quite a blaze of old world
beauty, for it was, by accident, a shop not unbeautiful in
itself. The front window had a glimmer of bronze and blue steel,
lit, as by a few stars, by the sparks of what were alleged to be
jewels; for it was in brief, a shop of bric-a-brac and old
curiosities. A row of half-burnished seventeenth-century swords
ran like an ornate railing along the front of the window; behind
was a darker glimmer of old oak and old armour; and higher up
hung the most extraordinary looking South Sea tools or utensils,
whether designed for killing enemies or merely for cooking them,
no mere white man could possibly conjecture. But the romance of
the eye, which really on this rich evening, clung about the shop,
had its main source in the accident of two doors standing open,
the front door that opened on the street and a back door that
opened on an odd green square of garden, that the sun turned to a
square of gold. There is nothing more beautiful than thus to look
as it were through the archway of a house; as if the open sky
were an interior chamber, and the sun a secret lamp of the place.

I have suggested that the sunset light made everything lovely. To
say that it made the keeper of the curiosity shop lovely would be
a tribute to it perhaps too extreme. It would easily have made
him beautiful if he had been merely squalid; if he had been a Jew
of the Fagin type. But he was a Jew of another and much less
admirable type; a Jew with a very well-sounding name. For though