hundred, including a shelf of the very first books he had read to himself. A large proportion consisted of the books of his youth. Having been lived through by the eager, docile Stodham, these poems, romances, essays, autobiographies, had each a genuine personality, however slight the difference of its cover from its neighbour’s. Another class represented aspirations, regrets, oblivions: half cut, dustier than the rest, these wore strange, sullen, ironical, or actually hostile looks. Some had been bought because it was inevitable that a young man should have a copy. Others, chiefly volumes in quarto or folio, played something like the parts of family portraits in a house of one of the new-rich. An unsuspecting ostentation had gone with some affection to their purchase. They gave a hint of “the dark backward and abysm of time” to that small room, dingy but new.... He leaned against the hot wall, receiving their various looks, returning them. Several times he bent forward to clutch this one or that, but saw another which he could not forsake for it, and so left both. He moved up close to the rows: he stood on tip-toe, he knelt. Some books he touched, others he opened. He put each one back. The room was silent with memory. He might have put them all in safety by this time. The most unexpected claims were made. For example, there was a black-letter “Morte d’Arthur” in olive calf. He had paid so much for it that he had to keep its existence secret: brown paper both concealed and protected it. He did, in fact, put this with a few others, chosen from time to time, on a chair. Only a very few were without any claims--histories and the like, of which there are thousands of copies, all the same. The unread and never-to-be-read volumes put in claims unexpectedly. No refusal could be made without a qualm. He looked at the select pile on the chair dissatisfied. Rather than take them only he would go away empty. “You had better look sharp, sir,” said a fireman, vaulting over the desk. Mr Stodham looked at the mute multitude of books and saw all in a flash. Nevertheless not one could he make up his mind to rescue. But on the mantelpiece lay a single book until now unnoticed--a small eighteenth century book in worn contemporary binding, an illustrated book of travels in Africa by a Frenchman--which he had long ago paid twopence for and discontinued his relations with it. He swiftly picked up this book and was, therefore, able to lend it to Mr Morgan for the sake of the plates. But after all he saved all his other books also. The fire did not reach his house, and the one thing damaged was the desk which the firemen had to leap on to and over in passing through to the back of the house.