Midway in the journey, Joe and his aged mistress dismounted to cross the Trent,--and four more miles brought them to Gainsborough. On arriving at the market-town, the good old dame, somewhat to the lad's surprise, presented him with half-a-crown,--a sum he had never, till then, possessed. After a brief preface of prudence, she informed him that he was at liberty to spend the next three hours in looking at the rarities in the market, in walking about the town, or in any mode that he thought would most highly gratify his curiosity. Joe set forth, anticipating sights which might afford a passing gratification; but in the course of the first hour became immovably attracted by a display of merchandise, from which the rustic traffickers of the market, too generally, turned away with indifference,--a spacious stall of old books. The image of a homely country lad, clad in a rustic garb, and shod with heavy-laced boots, standing by that old book-stall, presented a very uninteresting spectacle to the market people at Gainsborough. The butter-women brushed rudely past him, grumbling at the awkwardness with which he obstructed their crowded path; and the hucksters roughly cursed him, half-overturning the absorbed youth in their haste to forestall each other in cheapening the produce of the village dairies. Yet Joe was wont to refer to the hour during which he looked over the tattered treasures of the travelling bookseller as the most important in his whole life. He laid out the first half-crown he had ever possessed in purchasing the translated work of a French philosopher, without knowing, for many months after, that the author of the book bore an opprobious designation among theologians. At successive periods of his after-history, Joe attributed this occurrence to the operation of the inevitable laws of necessity, to accident, to permissive Providence: but, without entering into the labyrinth of his progressive trains of thought, or solving the question of the validity of any of his conclusions,--suffice it to say, that the purchase of that book produced a sequel of the most intense interest to the young and undirected inquirer. Joe had but just paid his half-crown into the hand of the bookseller, and buttoned the volume in the breast of his coat, when his ears were stricken by the boisterous tones of a bawling pedlar. With remarkable elongation of face, the man was proclaiming the wondrous contents of a pamphlet that he held in his hand, copies of which he was offering for sale, "amazingly cheap," as he avowed, to the staring by-standers. The stroller rapidly gleaned coppers among the wonder-stricken butter-women, who forgot their baskets in the serious interest awakened by the pedlar's tale; and Joe could not refrain from noting the comments which the simple people made upon the story.