“One day, I was offered a small volume which lacked the title and two leaves. There was nothing specially attractive about the book, but the same intuition for which I never could account and that guided me through my whole life as a bookseller, urged me to offer the owner $2.00, which was readily accepted. Later, I found out that the book was a copy of the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in New England, Cambridge, 1640. Bishop Hurst bought the book for $1,000, and after his death, it fetched $2,500 in the auction of his library. But I have also met with great disappointments. The greatest one was on a visit to an old Boston family residing on Beacon Hill. An elderly lady, the only surviving member of this family, wished to dispose of her library, and I found her seated between two piles of books busily engaged in tearing out the fly leaves wherever they contained any inscriptions. Nothing could induce her to stop this barbaric atrocity. I begged of her to let me examine the fly leaves and titles before she threw them in the open grate. I saw to my grief, John Hancock’s inscriptions, and George Washington’s presentation to some lady contemporary, revolutionary persons of the first importance. Another opportunity I missed was years ago when Mr. James J. Blaine happened to drop in our shop, selecting a copy of Count Grammont’s “Memoirs,” asking to have the volume laid aside for him. He wrote his name on the title page and was to call and pay for it on his return to the hotel. The incident must have slipped his memory, for he never returned for the book, and I was foolish enough to erase his signature from the fly leaf. Especially in our days, where “_Association books_” were so very much in demand, Blaine’s name in the “Memoirs” would have been a sought after curiosity.” Lauriat’s A sort of Brentano’s in Boston. The gathering place of society, of students and of scholars. They carry everything from the rarest book to some new Parisian magazine, whose first number appeared four weeks ago. Mr. Weber, the head of the firm, looks like Napoleon III, and has the most splendid contempt for everything new in book lore. Mr. Braithwaite was in his shop during my visit and it was astonishing to hear the anthologist of six volumes of new poetry talking a sensible everyday language. A New and Evil Spirit Boylston street faces the big park, is a lively promenade, a good deal of shopping is done in its neighborhood, a street always densely populated. _The Garden Side Book Shop_ hung out its shingle here, which consists of a huge garden gate.