第68章

Do you know what to do about it? I 'll tell you,--no, I 'll show you.Look at this volume.M.T.Ciceronis Opera,--a dozen of 'em, --one of 'em minus half his cover, a poor one-legged cripple, six months ago,--now see him.

--He looked very respectably indeed, both covers dark, ancient, very decently matched; one would hardly notice the fact that they were not twins.

-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 Ito 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."Think of this as the Dedication of a book "universally allowed to be the best which that controversy produced," and what a flood of light it pours on the insanities of those self-analyzing diarists whose morbid reveries have been so often mistaken for piety! No.I.had something for me, then, besides the cover, which was all it claimed to have worth offering.

No.II.was "A View of Society and Manners in Italy." Vol.III.By John Moore, M.D.(Zeluco Moore.) You know his pleasant book.In this particular volume what interested me most, perhaps, was the very spirited and intelligent account of the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius, but it gave me an hour's mighty agreeable reading.So much for Number Two.

No.III.was "An ESSAY On the Great EFFECTS of Even Languid and Unheeded LOCAL MOTION." By the Hon.Robert Boyle.Published in 1685, and, as appears from other sources, "received with great and general applause." I confess I was a little startled to find how near this earlier philosopher had come to the modern doctrines, such as are illustrated in Tyndall's "Heat considered as a Mode of Motion." He speaks of "Us, who endeavor to resolve the Phenomena of Nature into Matter and Local motion." That sounds like the nineteenth century, but what shall we say to this? "As when a bar of iron or silver, having been well hammered, is newly taken off of the anvil; though the eye can discern no motion in it, yet the touch will readily perceive it to be very hot, and if you spit upon it, the brisk agitation of the insensible parts will become visible in that which they will produce in the liquor." He takes a bar of tin, and tries whether by bending it to and fro two or three times he cannot "procure a considerable internal commotion among the parts "; and having by this means broken or cracked it in the middle, finds, as he expected, that the middle parts had considerably heated each other.

There are many other curious and interesting observations in the volume which I should like to tell you of, but these will serve my purpose.

--Which book furnished you the old cover you wanted? --said I.

--Did he kill the owl ?--said the Master, laughing.[I suppose you, the reader, know the owl story.]--It was Number Two that lent me one of his covers.Poor wretch! He was one of three, and had lost his two brothers.From him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.The Scripture had to be fulfilled in his case.But Icouldn't help saying to myself, What do you keep writing books for, when the stalls are covered all over with 'em, good books, too, that nobody will give ten cents apiece for, lying there like so many dead beasts of burden, of no account except to strip off their hides?

What is the use, I say? I have made a book or two in my time, and Iam making another that perhaps will see the light one of these days.