Books and reading -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Grandparent and child -- Fiction; Physicians -- Fiction
"Precisely. Well, I turn off here. I am going to pay a call upon a
gentleman who made a large fortune out of Civilian War Work of
National Importance. _He_ has acquired a library, too--quite
recently and all at once--beautifully bound in morocco and tree calf.
But I doubt if he could quote a single line from a single volume
therein. Baxter for me, every time! Good-afternoon."
Secondly, from McAndrew.
"Yon auld felly, Baxter," he suddenly remarked to me one day while
driving me home from a professional round, and passing the door of
Number Twenty-One; "he's real respeckit in the toon. In Scotland, of
course, he would be naebody, for every one's educatit there. But
here there's men making as much as seeven pound a week at the Phoenix
Linoleum Works, on the south side, that has read naething since they
passed through school but the Sabbath newspapers. They look on
Baxter as a kin' o' Cyclopedy. _But_--I was in there the other nicht
for a bit crack, and I asked him what he thought of Rabbie Burns.
_He'd never heard tell of him_! There's your Oracle!"
"Mr. Baxter is a self-made man of letters," I said. "He got most of
his learning second-hand from the Archdeacon. Perhaps the Archdeacon
was not a student of Burns, either."
The enormity of this suggestion quite paralyzed McAndrew for a while.
Presently he recovered sufficiently to resume: "Yon Archdeacon was a
doited sort of body. He lived all alone in yon dreich-lookin' house
in the Cathedral Close nigh fufty year. He had naething aboot him
but books, and naebody aboot him but an auld wife, Mistress Corby,
and Baxter. She's deid now, but her dochter married on the
ironmonger in High Street. It was her was telling me. Mistress
Corby did the beds and the cooking, and Baxter did everything else.
He redd up the library, and dusted the books. He carried the coals
and sorted the garden as weel. And where do you think the Archdeacon
got him?"
"Baxter?"
"Aye, Baxter. _Singin' in the street_! There's few fowk in this
toon ken that, or mind it. But Baxter just drufted into the place
one wet day, with the toes stickin' oot of his boots, and the
Archdeacon found him standin' in the rain and took him intil the
hoose and kept him. Twenty-five shillin' a week he got, with two
suits of clothes a year and a bit present at Christmas. He bided
there thirty years, and the Archdeacon never repented of his bargain.
Good servants is scarce."
McAndrew paused impressively, to allow this last truth to sink in,
and continued.
"I jalouse the way Baxter got an so weel with the Archdeacon was the
interest he took in the library. He was never oot of it, unless he
was pitten oot. It wasna so much that he would read the books as
worship them. He would take them oot and hold them in his hands by
the hour, or sit back on a chair and glower at their backs on the
shelves. So Mistress Corby's dochter that married on the ironmonger
tellt me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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