Those two cigars and that 'noggin' of whiskey,
which he purchases with such a fine solemnity as he and I go home
together for occasional symposia in his bachelor lodging--those, I say,
come not without sale of such treatises, such geographies, chemistries,
and French grammars.
But I am digressing. There is a distinguishing air, I but meant to say,
about the little shop. Looking closer, one generally finds that it comes
of a choice bit of old binding, or the quaint title-page of some tuneful
Elizabethan. It was an old Crashaw that first drew me inside; and,
though for some reason I did not buy it then, I bought it a year after,
because to it I owed the friendship of Samuel Dale.
And thus for three bright years that little shop came to be, for a daily
hour or so, a blessed palm-tree away from the burden and heat of the
noon, a holy place whither the money-changers and such as sold doves
might never come, let their clamour in the outer courts ring never so
loud. There in Samuel's talk did two weary-hearted bond-servants of
Egypt draw a breath of the Infinite into their lives of the desk; there
could they sit awhile by the eternal springs, and feel the beating of
the central heart.
So it happened one afternoon, about five years ago, that I dropped in
there according to wont. But Samuel was engaged with some one in that
dim corner at the far end of the shop, where his desk and arm-chair,
tripod of that new philosophy, stood: so I turned to a neighbouring
shelf to fill the time.
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