I merely sniffed and turned to catch a jitney; I had come from a survey of certain downtown shops and felt that I had no more time to waste. Then I saw the proprietor, sitting in an easy-chair in his window, which framed dull old spectacles within a luxuriant and mighty fringe of reddish-grey whiskers. Fascinated, I turned again. Once more to try my luck! Hopeless though I knew it to be, I would still essay the impossible--and I entered. Truth to tell, my entry was compelled less by hope than by that curious spectacle in the window. In the doorway I came to a pause, aghast before a dim array of shelves which at some prior day had been assorted, but were now jumbled and heaped in a most erratic madness of confusion. The fringed old gentleman in the easy chair was reading one of his own books; and this was an excellent sign. He barely vouchsafed a grunt to my greeting, directed me to switch on the lamps and help myself, then resumed his book and a huge pipe. As directed, I turned on the lights and began my explorations. Already the mystic alchemy of this stage-setting held me gripped in a pleasant excitation, a glowing confidence that here awaited unguessed treasure-trove! Mirabile dictu! At the very first turn I pulled down a glorious big volume, newly bound in half morocco, which proved to be no other than Dr. Shaw's Travels in Barbary. Every map, every letter and engraving and page was perfect, even the paper was as chastely unblemished as when struck off the press of Oxford University in the days of the first George. The press-work, like that of the first folio of Beaumont & Fletcher, was a delight to the eye; abounding in Arabic, old-style Greek, Hebrew and less-remembered tongues, it was all as nobly executed as if it had been drawn by hand and lithographed. A price was penciled on the flyleaf; it would scarcely have amounted to taxicab fare home. I sighed over the high insolence that prompts dealers to face their customers with the prices these wares fetched twenty or fifty years ago; then I turned to the fringed divinity with tremulous query. "Everything marked plain," he made response, without raising his eyes from the book in his lap. Ye gods and little bookworms--the dream had come true! Or was it a chance find--perhaps some lure to catch unwary feet? No matter; within five minutes dinner was forgotten, all responsibilities put aside, and I was hooked fast. Those unordered shelves held everything from Russian novels to French scientific treatises, and Americana ran riot. Imagine a copy of Vetelius, that rare edition of saga-chants, for fifty cents; and, no less expensive, a spanking fine copy of Mme. de Grandfort's execrated work on the Louisiana Creoles, serene in its dingy binding of ante-bellum days! Here was the sort of place hitherto found only in romancers' tales!