By this time Tegg was thriving;--he bought his first great-coat, and the first silk pelisse for his wife, and was able to make a rule of paying in cash, which he found an immense advantage. The book auctions, continued nightly at 111, Cheapside, formed the immediate stepping-stone to his wealth. He visited all the trade sales, and bought up the “remainders,” _i.e._, surplus copies of works in which the original publishers had no faith;--“I was,” he writes, “the broom that swept the booksellers’ warehouses.” At one of the dinners preceding these trade sales, he heard Alderman Cadell give the then famous toast--“The Bookseller’s four B’s”--Burns, Blair, Buchan, and Blackstone. In the auctioneer’s rostrum he was very lively and amusing, and the room became well known all over London. At one of the last sales, a gentleman who purchased a book asked if “he ever left off selling for a single night?” Fifteen years before, on his road to the dock to embark for Calcutta, he found Tegg busy, and as busy still on his return. “If ever man was devoted to his profession, I am that man,” says Tegg; and again--“I feel that my moral courage is sufficient to carry out anything I resolve to accomplish.” Now that his own publications were proving very lucrative, Tegg resolved to abandon the auctioneering portion of the business, and confine himself to the more legitimate trade; and, at his last sale, he took upwards of eighty pounds. The purchase and sale of remainders, however, still formed a very important branch of his traffic. About this time he took another journey to Scotland, and had an interview with Sir Walter Scott, who had, he says, “nothing in his manner or conversation to impress a visitor with his greatness.” Immediately on his return he made his final remove to the Mansion House, Cheapside--once the residence of the Lord Mayor--and the annual current of sales rose in the proportion of from eighteen to twenty-two. Now a popular as well as a wealthy man, he was elected a Common Councillor of the Ward of Cheap, took a country house at Norwood, with a beautiful garden attached--“though I scarcely knew a rose from a rhododendron”--and set up a carriage. It was, of course, from the Mansion House that his well-known publications were dated. In 1825, the year after the purchase of the “Table Book,” he published the “London Encyclopædia;” it was a time of great financial difficulty (as we have, indeed, seen in almost all our lives of contemporary publishers); his bills were dishonoured to the extent of twenty thousand pounds; and the work was began solely to give employment to those who had been faithful in more prosperous years. The public, however, supported the undertaking, and Tegg was rewarded for his courage.