-I 'll tell you what I did. You poor devil, said I, you are a disgrace to your family. We must send you to a surgeon and have some kind of a Taliacotian operation performed on you. (You remember the operation as described in Hudibras, of course.) The first thing was to find a subject of similar age and aspect ready to part with one of his members. So I went to Quidlibet's,--you know Quidlibet and that hieroglyphic sign of his with the omniscient-looking eye as its most prominent feature,--and laid my case before him. I want you, said I, to look up an old book of mighty little value,--one of your ten-cent vagabonds would be the sort of thing,--but an old beggar, with a cover like this, and lay it by for me. And Quidlibet, who is a pleasant body to deal with,--only he has insulted one or two gentlemanly books by selling them to me at very low-bred and shamefully insufficient prices,--Quidlibet, I say, laid by three old books for me to help myself from, and did n't take the trouble even to make me pay the thirty cents for 'em. Well, said I to myself, let us look at our three books that have undergone the last insult short of the trunkmaker's or the paper-mills, and see what they are. There may be something worth looking at in one or the other of 'em. Now do you know it was with a kind of a tremor that I untied the package and looked at these three unfortunates, too humble for the companionable dime to recognize as its equal in value. The same sort of feeling you know if you ever tried the Bible-and-key, or the Sortes Virgiliance. I think you will like to know what the three books were which had been bestowed upon me gratis, that I might tear away one of the covers of the one that best matched my Cicero, and give it to the binder to cobble my crippled volume with. The Master took the three books from a cupboard and continued. No. I. An odd volume of The Adventurer. It has many interesting things enough, but is made precious by containing Simon Browne's famous Dedication to the Queen of his Answer to Tindal's “Christianity as old as the Creation.” Simon Browne was the Man without a Soul. An excellent person, a most worthy dissenting minister, but lying under a strange delusion. Here is a paragraph from his Dedication: “He was once a man; and of some little name; but of no worth, as his present unparalleled case makes but too manifest; for by the immediate hand of an avenging GOD, his very thinking substance has, for more than seven years, been continually wasting away, till it is wholly perished out of him, if it be not utterly come to nothing. None, no, not the least remembrance of its very ruins, remains, not the shadow of an idea is left, nor any sense that so much as one single one, perfect or imperfect, whole or diminished, ever did appear to a mind within him, or was perceived by it.”