The birth of Philip adding to the doctor’s expenses, it soon came about that, in the land where he had hoped to make a new fortune, he parted with the last of what fortune he had originally possessed.  Then occurred to him the ingenious thought of turning bookseller, a business which, far from requiring that he should ever absent himself from his precious volumes, demanded rather that he should always be among them.  But the stock that he laid in, turned out to comprise rather such works as a gentleman of learning would choose for company, than such as the people of Philadelphia preferred to read.  Furthermore, when some would-be purchaser appeared, it often happened that the book he offered to buy was one for which the erudite dealer had acquired so strong an affection that he would not let it change owners.  Nor did his wife much endeavour to turn him from this untradesmanlike course.  Besides being a gentle and affectionate woman, she had that admiration for learning which, like excessive warmth of heart and certain other traits, I have observed to be common between the Scotch (she was of Edinburgh, as I have said) and the best of the Americans.

Such was Philip’s father, and when he died of some trouble of the heart, there was nothing for his widow to do but continue the business.  She did this with more success than the doctor had had, though many a time it smote her heart to sell some book of those that her husband had loved, and to the backs of which she had become attached for his sake and through years of acquaintance.  But the necessities of her little boy and herself cried out, and so did the debt her husband had accumulated as tangible result of his business career.  By providing books of a less scholarly, more popular character, such as novels, sermons, plays, comic ballads, religious poems, and the like; as well as by working with her needle, and sometimes copying legal and other documents, Mrs. Winwood managed to keep the kettle boiling.  And in the bookselling and the copying, she soon came to have the aid of Philip.

The boy, too, loved books passionately, finding in them consolation for the deprivations incidental to his poverty.  But, being keenly sympathetic, he had a better sense of his mother’s necessities than his father had shown, and to the amelioration of her condition and his own, he sacrificed his love of books so far as to be, when occasion offered, an uncomplaining seller of those he liked, and a dealer in those he did not like.  His tastes were, however, broader than his father’s, and he joyfully lost himself in the novels and plays his father would have disdained.

He read, indeed, everything he could put his hands on, that had, to his mind, reason, or wit, or sense, or beauty.  Many years later, when we were in London, his scholarly yet modest exposition of a certain subject eliciting the praise of a group in a Pall Mall tavern, and he being asked “What university he was of,” he answered, with a playful smile, “My father’s bookshop.”  It was, indeed, his main school of book-learning.  But, as I afterward told him, he had studied in the university of life also.  However, I am now writing of his boyhood in Philadelphia; and of that there is only this left to be said.