I was especially delighted with my discovery, among a lot of old trousers in a second-hand shop, of a board-cover copy of “Watts on the Mind.” Its fine print, copious foot-notes, its mysterious references, as “Seq.,” “i.e.,” “Aris. Book IV., ff.,” put the stamp upon it as being a very scholarly book indeed. I looked it through, and not finding any conversation in it, judged that it was not too light. Its analytical chapter headings, and its birthmark, “182--,” fully persuaded me that I might get educated from that sort of a book! In the salvage rooms, where I obtained most of my treasures, I obtained a black, cloth-bound book, with mottled damp pages and with a mouldy flavor to it, entitled, “Scriptural Doctrine,” which I knew was a dry book, because it was a religious book printed in the 40’s. It undertook to summarize all the great and fearsome doctrines from the Fall to the Recovery by massing every appropriate passage of scripture under them, and concluding, with loyalty to the major premises, with stout assertions that they were all true because they were. I also found, in the same place and on the same day, a well-worn, pencil-marked, dog-eared copy of “A History of the Ancient World,” filled with quaint wood-cuts of ruined walls, soldiers in battle, with steel spears and bare feet. It was covered with a crumpled piece of paper bag, and there were only two leaves missing two-thirds of the way in the book, cutting the history of the Greeks right in two. I knew that that would be a scholar’s book on the face of it. Scholars always read about old nations and destroyed cities, and that book was filled with such records. I was pleased with it. I also picked up, in the salvage rooms, a three-volume edition of “The Cottage Bible,” two volumes of which were without covers, and one of them had most of the leaves stained as if it had been in a fire somewhere. It was an edition printed somewhere near the beginning of the nineteenth century. I bought that, first, because it was a three-volume edition on one subject; it was ponderous. Scholars always had such books. I also bought it because it had so many notes in it. Half of each page was covered with them in fine print. To me, that was the highest type of intellectual book.