Mr. Bemerton has had his triumphs; but he does not want them. He wants to progress smoothly in the middle way. Yet he has discovered two or three valuable MSS. which brought him some hundreds of pounds from English collectors and would, had he been willing to sell them to America, have produced ten times as much: and among his regular customers was Mr. Gladstone, who, when he was at No. 10 Downing Street during his last term of office as Premier, often looked in and always found something. It was almost impossible for a book to carry no association for that swooping, pouncing brain. He either knew it, or knew of it, or had always wanted to know it. It was Mr. Gladstone who made the suggestion to Mr. Bemerton that booksellers should open at night. "The time for second-hand book-shops," he said, "is after one's work, not during one's work. I should like to stroll round this way after the House rose, even in the small hours of the morning, and spend a quarter of an hour by your shelves. So would most of the Members of both Houses. It would pay you." "If you will announce it, sir, in a speech, I will do so," said Mr. Bemerton, and the great man laughed. The last book that Mr. Gladstone bought was Hartley Coleridge's _Northern Worthies_. "A good book," said he, "but it might have been better. Hartley would have written better had he been his father's grandson instead of son. He was too near." Mr. Bemerton ventured to suggest that perhaps he was too near Wordsworth also. "Oh no," said Mr. Gladstone. "He parodied him, and once he stole a leg of mutton from his larder, for a joke. That shows that Wordsworth could do him no harm." Mr. Gladstone is Mr. Bemerton's trump card, but he tells me that Carlyle came in once, but once only. He bought Evelyn's _Life of Mrs. Godolphin_ in Pickering's edition--to give, he said, to a foolish young woman; and he arranged with Mr. Bemerton to have it bound with the editor's introduction omitted. Mr. Bemerton says that after leaving the shop Carlyle returned to make certain that his instructions were understood. "Be sure to cut out the pipe-lights!" were his exact words. Rather hard on Samuel of Oxford. Another customer was Mr. Locker-Lampson, who liked books to be slender and pocketable, but whose taste was a little too fastidious for Mr. Bemerton's shelves. Mr. Bemerton treasures an autograph copy of _Patchwork_ which its author sent him.