Every scholar should
have a book infirmary attached his library. There should find a
peaceable refuge the many books, invalids from their birth, which are
sent "with the best regards of the Author"; the respected, but
unpresentable cripples which have lost cover; the odd volumes of honored
sets which go mourning all their days for their lost brother; the
school-books which have been so often the subjects of assault and
battery, that they look as if the police must know them by heart; these
and still more the pictured story-books, beginning with Mother Goose
(which a dear old friend of mine has just been amusing his philosophic
leisure with turning most ingeniously and happily into the tongues of
Virgil and Homer), will be precious mementos by and by, when children and
grandchildren come along. What would I not give for that dear little
paper-bound quarto, in large and most legible type, on certain pages of
which the tender hand that was the shield of my infancy had crossed out
with deep black marks something awful, probably about BEARS, such as once
tare two-and-forty of us little folks for making faces, and the very name
of which made us hide our heads under the bedclothes.
I made strange acquaintances in that book infirmary up in the southeast
attic. The "Negro Plot" at New York helped to implant a feeling in me
which it took Mr.
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