But now to tiffin. I smell a smell of curried prawns, and the first mangoes of the season are fragrant. Buxsoo, the _khansaman_, has cooled the _isherry-shrob_, as he calls the "green seal," and the _kilmudgars_ are crying, "_Tiffin, Sahib_!" The Mamoul of meal-time knows no caste or country. _Bur zi hyat ky kooree! Gur nu moodum, mi kooree! Badu bi koor bu yadi o, Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou_! "Gentle boy, whose silver feet Nimbly move to cadence sweet, Fill us quick the generous wine, Ever fresh and ever fine!" * * * * * BOOKS. It is easy to accuse books, and bad ones are easily found, and the best are but records, and not the things recorded; and certainly there is dilettanteism enough, and books that are merely neutral and do nothing for us. In Plato's "Gorgias," Socrates says, "The ship-master walks in a modest garb near the sea, after bringing his passengers from Aegina or from Pontus, not thinking he has done anything extraordinary, and certainly knowing that his passengers are the same, and in no respect better than when he took them on board." So is it with books, for the most part; they work no redemption in us. The bookseller might certainly know that his customers are in no respect better for the purchase and consumption of his wares. The volume is dear at a dollar, and, after reading to weariness the lettered backs, we leave the shop with a sigh, and learn, as I did, without surprise, of a surly bank-director, that in bank parlors they estimate all stocks of this kind as rubbish. But it is not less true that there are books which are of that importance in a man's private experience, as to verify for him the fables of Cornelius Agrippa, of Michael Scott, or of the old Orpheus of Thrace; books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative; books which are the work and the proof of faculties so comprehensive, so nearly equal to the world which they paint, that, though one shuts them with meaner ones, he feels his exclusion from them to accuse his way of living. Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.