"Well!" I said, "I should think you _would_ need a pretty stout
steed to lug that load along. It must weigh more than a coal wagon."

"Oh, Peg can manage it all right," he said. "We don't travel very
fast. But look here, I want to sell out. Do you suppose your husband
would buy the outfit--Parnassus, Pegasus, and all? He's fond of
books, isn't he?

"Hold on a minute!" I said. "Andrew's my brother, not my husband,
and he's altogether _too_ fond of books. Books'll be the ruin of
this farm pretty soon. He's mooning about over his books like a
sitting hen about half the time, when he ought to be mending
harness. Lord, if he saw this wagonload of yours he'd be unsettled
for a week. I have to stop the postman down the road and take all
the publishers' catalogues out of the mail so that Andrew don't
see 'em. I'm mighty glad he's not here just now, I can tell you!"

I'm not literary, as I said before, but I'm human enough to like
a good book, and my eye was running along those shelves of his
as I spoke. He certainly had a pretty miscellaneous collection.
I noticed poetry, essays, novels, cook books, juveniles, school
books, Bibles, and what not--all jumbled together.

"Well, see here," said the little man--and about this time I noticed
that he had the bright eyes of a fanatic--"I've been cruising with
this Parnassus going on seven years. I've covered the territory from
Florida to Maine and I reckon I've injected about as much good
literature into the countryside as ever old Doc Eliot did with his
five-foot shelf. I want to sell out now. I'm going to write a book