Four rhymes seem to be specially the property of schoolboys, being found in Accidences, Spellers, "Logick" Primers, and other school-books, down even to the present day. "This book is one thing, My fist's another, If you touch the one thing, You'll feel the other." "Hic liber eat meus And that I will show Si aliquis capit I'll give him a blow." "This book is mine By Law Divine And if it runs astray I'll call you kind My desk to find And put it safe away." "Hic liber est meus Deny it who can Zenas Graves Junior An honest man." There also appears a practical warning which may be read with attention and profit by the public now a days: "If thou art borrowed by a friend Right welcome shall he be To read, to study, _not_ to lend But to _return_ to me. "Not that imparted knowledge doth Diminish Learnings Store But books I find if often lent Return to me no more." "Read _Slowly_--Pause _Frequently_--Think _Seriously_--Finger _Lightly_--Keep _Cleanly_--Return _Duly_--with the _Corners_ of the Leaves NOT TURNED DOWN." The fashion of using book-plates was by no means so general among New England Puritans as among rich Virginians and New Yorkers and Pennsylvanian Quakers. Mr. Lichtenstein, writing in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1886, says he has seen no New England book-plates of earlier date than 1735. At later dates the Holyokes, Dudleys, Boylstons, and Phillips, all used book-plates. The plates most familiar to students in old libraries in New England are those of the Vaughans and of Isaiah Thomas. Another, a living interest is found in these old, dusty, leather-bound volumes, which is not in the inscriptions and not, alas, in the printed words. They are the chosen home of a race of pigmy spiderlings who love musty theology with an affection found in no one else nowadays. In these dingy homes they live and rear their hideous little progeny: for in the cold light of a microscope these tiny brown book-dwellers are not beautiful; they are flat, crab-like, goggle-eyed, hairy; and they zigzag across the page on their ugly crooked legs in a sprawling, drunken fashion. They do not eat the books; they live apparently on air; yet if you crush them between the pages they leave a stain of vivid scarlet to reproach you in future readings for your needless cruelty. I cannot kill them; though flaming is their blood's rebuke, it is aristocratically as well as theologically blue. In their veins runs the ichor--arachnidian though it be--that came over in the Mayflower; yes, doubly honored, came over in the special stateroom of an Ainsworth's Psalm-Book or a Genevan Bible. No degrading alliances, no admixtures through foreign emigration, have crossed that pure inbred strain; my book-spiders are of real Pilgrim stock--they are true New England Brahmins.