In one of the narrow purlieus leading from the City to the eastern wilderness, night had erased the actual like a wet cloth drawn across writing in chalk upon a board. Two rows of sopping shuttered walls were only able to emit an occasional smear of lamplight, by which the pageant of the individual consciousness could embody itself. Here and there a signboard would be half-disclosed over some deserted shop; and in the middle of a long and very dismal thoroughfare was one that seemed to take a quality from the fact that a faint gleam of light was stealing through a chink in the shutters of a door. Above this door, in faded letters which the film of shadows rendered barely visible, was the legend, “Second-hand Bookseller.” It seemed to be centuries old. The light, however, frail as it was, somehow appeared to make it memorable. Yet the source of this talisman was not the shop itself, but a little room that lay behind. This small shop in which a thousand and one volumes huddled, like corpses in a chasm, seemed almost to form an intermediary between the real on the one hand, and the chimerical on the other. On its shelves, in a limbo of darkness and neglect, lay the dead, the dying, and the imperishable. Buried in dust and decay, in covers that could hardly hold together, were pregnant annotations upon the human comedy. On the upper shelves were tomes whose destiny it had been to hold back the hands of time, and had duly fulfilled it. Below these were a thousand formulas which had proved disconcerting to man. Still, however, as in the sodden and shadow-fraught chimera beyond the shutters, even here darkness did not reign inviolate. There were tiny lamps on this shelf and that: like those in the street without the power to offer more than a flicker of light, yet able to suggest that the blackest night is susceptible of challenge. A candle shone here and there in the gloom, faint yet invincible, like a will-o’-the-wisp that hops about the mounds in a cemetery. Opening out of the shop was a little inner room. It was from this that the thread of light proceeded. This tiny chamber, some twelve feet by sixteen, had little furniture. In the centre was a quaint old table. A curious tome of yellow parchments was spread open upon it. Built into the outer wall was a cupboard. Its heavy oak door was studded with nails and strongly secured. In the grate the fire was bright; the bare floor and walls were spotless; and from the low ceiling depended a lamp in the form of a censer whose light was soft yet clear. The room had two occupants: a man whose hair was almost white and a boy. Each was immersed in a book: the man in the tome outspread on the table, whose yellow leaves, venerable binding, and iron clasps, gave it a monastic appearance; the boy was reading in the ancient authors.