Well, said I to 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.
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