Looking up, I saw that the voice was that of a shabby, but perky, octavo, which I had forgotten I ever possessed, since the day when some mistaken charity had prompted me to rescue it from the threepenny box and give it a good home in a respectable family of books.  Certainly, it had so far filled the humble position of a shelf-liner, and its accidental elevation into daylight on the top of a prostrate folio had evidently turned its head.  It was now doing its best to disseminate socialistic principles among the set of scurvy octavos and duodecimos in its neighbourhood.

‘Why should we choke with dust in the dark there,’ it continued, ’that these splendid creatures should glitter all day in the sunshine, and get all the firelight of an evening?  We were born to be read as much as they, born to enjoy our share of the good things of this world as much as my Lord Folio, as much as any Honourable Quarto, or fashionable Large Paper.  My Brothers, the hour has come:  will you strike now or never, exact your rights as free-born books, or will you go back to be shelf-liners as before?’

[Loud cries of ‘No! no! we won’t,’ here encouraged the speaker.]

’Strike now, and the book unborn shall bless you.  Miss this golden opportunity, and the cause we serve will be delayed another hundred editions.’

At this point a great folio that had for some time been leaning threateningly, like a slab at Stonehenge, above the speaker, suddenly fell and silenced him; but he had not spoken in vain, and from various sets of books about the room I heard the voices of excited agitators taking up his words.  Then an idea struck me.  I was, as I told you, heartily sick of my task of arrangement.  Here seemed an opportunity.

‘Look here,’ I said,’you shall have it all to yourselves.  I resign, I abdicate.  You shall arrange yourselves as you please, but be quick about it, and let there be as little bloodshed as possible’

With that there arose such a hubbub as was never before heard in a quiet book-room, not even during that famous battle of the St. James’s Library in 1697; and conspicuous among the noises was a strange crowing sound as of young cocks, which I was at a loss to understand, till I bethought me how Mentzelius, long ago, sitting in the quiet of his library, had heard the bookworm ‘crow like a cock unto his mate.’  On looking I saw that the insurgents had indeed pressed into their service a certain politic body of bookworms as joyous heralds, whom I had never suspected of inhabiting my books at all—­though, indeed, such hidden creatures do crawl out of their corners in times of upheaval.