The great stream of the world goes by; None care, or heed, or question, why I, the lone student, cannot raise My voice or hand as in old days. No echo seems to wake again My heart to anything but pain, Save when a dream of twilight brings The fluttering of an angel's wings! ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER. OF HANDLING BOOKS We not only set before ourselves a service to God in preparing volumes of new books, but we exercise the duties of a holy piety if we just handle so as not to injure them, then return them to their proper places, and commend them to undefiling custody that they may rejoice in their purity while held in the hand, and repose in security when laid up in their repositories.... In the first place, then, let there be a mature decorum in opening and closing of volumes, that they may neither be unclasped with precipitous haste, nor thrown aside after inspection without being duly closed; for it is necessary that a book should be much more carefully preserved than a shoe.... A stiff-necked youth, lounging sluggishly in his study ... distributes innumerable straws in various places, with the ends in sight, that he may recall by the mark what his memory cannot retain.... He is not ashamed to eat fruit and cheese over an open book, and to transfer his empty cup from side to side upon it: and because he has not his alms-bag at hand, he leaves the rest of the fragments in his books.... He next reclines with his elbows on the book, and by a short study invites a long nap; and by way of repairing the wrinkles, he twists back the margins of the leaves, to the no small detriment of the volume.... But impudent boys are to be specially restrained from meddling with books, who, when they are learning to draw the forms of letters, if copies of the most beautiful books are allowed them, begin to become incongruous annotators, and wherever they perceive the broadest margin about the text, they furnish it with a monstrous alphabet, or their unchastened pen immediately presumes to draw any other frivolous thing whatever, that occurs to their imagination.... There are also certain thieves who enormously dismember books by cutting off the side margins for letter paper, leaving only the letters or text, or the fly-leaves put in for the preservation of the book, which they take away for various uses and abuses, which sort of sacrilege ought to be prohibited under a threat of anathema. But it is altogether befitting the decency of a scholar that washing should without fail precede reading, as often as he returns from his meals to study, before his fingers, besmeared with grease, loosen a clasp or turn over the leaf of a book.--R. DE BURY. _Philobiblon._ DEDUCTIONS FROM SCRIPTURE