But ill has some ‘gentle Reader’ attended to the behest, for, as I said, but one of the flowers remains.  One is lost—­and Narcissus has gone away.  This inscription is but one of many such scattered here and there through his books, for he had a great facility in such minor graces, as he had a neat hand at tying a bow.  I don’t think he ever sent a box of flowers without his fertility serving him with some rose-leaf fancy to accompany them; and on birthdays and all red-letter days he was always to be counted upon for an appropriate rhyme.  If his art served no other purpose, his friend would be grateful to him for that alone, for many great days would have gone without their ‘white stone’ but for him; when, for instance, J.A.W. took that brave plunge of his, which has since so abundantly justified him and more than fulfilled prophecy; or when Samuel Dale took that bolder, namely a wife, he being a philosopher—­incidents, Reader, on which I long so to digress, and for which, if you could only know beforehand, you would, I am sure, give me freest hand.  But beautiful stories both, I may not tell of you here; though if the Reader and I ever spend together those hinted nights at the ‘Mermaid,’ I then may.

But to return.  I said above that if I were to enumerate all the books, so to say, ‘implicated’ in the love of Narcissus and his Thirteenth Maid, I should have to catalogue quite a small library.  I forgot for the moment what literal truth I was writing, for it was indeed in quite a large library that they first met.  In ‘our town’ there is, Reader, an old-world institution, which, I think, you would well like transported to yours, a quaint subscription library ‘established’ ever so long ago, full of wonderful nooks and corners, where (of course, if you are a member) one is sure almost at any time of the day of a solitary corner for a dream.  It is a sweet provision, too, that it is managed by ladies, whom you may, if you can, image to yourself as the Hesperides; for there are three of them; and may not the innumerable galleries and spiral staircases, serried with countless shelves, clustered thick with tome on tome, figure the great tree, with its many branches and its wonderful gold fruit—­the tree of knowledge?  The absence of the dragon from the similitude is as well, don’t you think?

Books, of all things, should be tended by reverent hands; and, to my mind, the perfunctory in things ecclesiastical is hardly more distressing than the service of books as conducted in many great libraries.  One feels that the librarii should be a sacred order, nearly allied to the monastic, refined by varying steps of initiation, and certainly celibates.  They should give out their books as the priest his sacrament, should wear sacred vestments, and bear about with them the priestlike aura, as of divine incarnations of the great spirit of Truth and Art in whose temples they are ministrants.  The next step to this ideal ministry is to have our books given