This apparently had not occurred to her, and it seemed to strike Mrs. Duckie (who is more jealous of the fair fame of what she calls gentlefolk than they themselves are likely ever to be) as an act of impropriety beyond pardon. But I had my way, and at last got Miss Wagstaff off in a hansom; but not before she had showered instructions upon me. "The prices," she said, "are marked just inside. They are all net, but if any one bought several books you might knock something off. Don't ever knock anything off a cheap book." "Be very careful," she said, "with people who look at the illustrations. Sometimes they pinch the plates." "Whatever you do," she said, "don't buy any books." "Keep an eye," she said, "on the outside shelves." "Don't let any one," she said, "stand too long reading." "See that they don't slip one book into their pocket while they buy another," she said. "Watch them," she said, "to see that they don't rub out our price and put in another themselves." That, I think, was her very last counsel. I sank down in a chair in a kind of stupor. I had not been prepared for such revelations of perfidy. I had thought of a second-hand bookshop as being off the main stream of human frailty and temptation; and behold it was the resort of the most abandoned! Is there no natural honesty? I wished that Mr. Bemerton would return and liberate me to walk upstairs out of life again and get on with my make-believe. It gave me at the same time a new idea of Miss Wagstaff, and I found myself admiring her. How naturally she took these things; how simple and right it seemed to her that customers should be suspect; while I--I had been sunning myself in a comfortable sense of all-pervading virtue, and was now cowering beneath the discovery of the contrary--I, a man of fifty and more, who had some claims to be considered a cosmopolitan and citizen of the world, and she a Cockney spinster with no experience of anything but her home and this shop. But a customer coming in, I had to suspend my reflections and attend to business, which in this case consisted in replying, with some decision, that we never bought last year's _Whitaker's Almanack_. The adaptability of man--how naturally I said "we"! Apart from the necessity of replenishing his stock by attending sales and buying books; the wearing task of looking narrowly at larcenous fellow-creatures; the pangs that it must cost him to sell the books that he wants to keep; and the attacks made upon his tenderer feelings by unfortunate impoverished creatures with worthless books to sell; apart from these drawbacks, the life of a second-hand bookseller seems to me a happy one. I could myself lead it with considerable contentment. During my four hours of authority I took eleven shillings, met some entertaining people, discovered on the shelves a number of interesting books, and read at intervals a poem I had long known by repute but never had seen before--Walter Pope's "Wish."