"To ye. Give the neddy a shove out i' the vay, and sit down, I say."

Lenny rather reluctantly, and somewhat superciliously, accepted this
invitation.

"I hears," said the tinker, in a voice made rather indistinct by a couple
of nails, which he had inserted between his teeth,--"I hears as how you
be unkimmon fond of reading. I ha' sum nice cheap books in my bag
yonder,--sum as low as a penny."

"I should like to see them," said Lenny, his eyes sparkling.

The tinker rose, opened one of the panniers on the ass's back, took out a
bag, which he placed before Lenny, and told him to suit himself. The
young peasant desired no better. He spread all the contents of the bag
on the sward, and a motley collection of food for the mind was there,--
food and poison, /serpentes avibus/ good and evil. Here Milton's
Paradise Lost, there "The Age of Reason;" here Methodist Tracts, there
"True Principles of Socialism,"--Treatises on Useful Knowledge by sound
learning actuated by pure benevolence, Appeals to Operatives by the
shallowest reasoners, instigated by the same ambition that had moved
Eratosthenes to the conflagration of a temple; works of fiction admirable
as "Robinson Crusoe," or innocent as "The Old English Baron," beside
coarse translations of such garbage as had rotted away the youth of
France under Louis Quinze. This miscellany was an epitome, in short, of
the mixed World of Books, of that vast city of the Press, with its
palaces and hovels, its aqueducts and sewers, which opens all alike to
the naked eye and the curious mind of him to whom you say, in the
tinker's careless phrase, "Suit yourself."