This division, you see, you can make almost as extensive or as limited as you choose.  You can crowd the great representative writers into a small compass; or you can make a library consisting only of the different editions of Horace, if you have space and money enough.  Then comes the Harem, the shelf or the bookcase of Delilahs, that you have paid wicked prices for, that you love without pretending to be reasonable about it, and would bag in case of fire before all the rest, just as Mr. Townley took the Clytie to his carriage when the anti-Catholic mob threatened his house in 1780.  As for the foundlings like my Hedericus, they go among their peers; it is a pleasure to take them, from the dusty stall where they were elbowed by plebeian school-books and battered odd volumes, and give them Alduses and Elzevirs for companions.

Nothing remains but the Infirmary.  The most painful subjects are the unfortunates that have lost a cover.  Bound a hundred years ago, perhaps, and one of the rich old browned covers gone—­what a pity!  Do you know what to do about it?  I ’ll tell you,—­no, I ’ll show you.  Look at this volume.  M. T. Ciceronis Opera,—­a dozen of ’em,—­one of ’em minus half his cover, a poor one-legged cripple, six months ago,—­now see him.

—­He looked very respectably indeed, both covers dark, ancient, very decently matched; one would hardly notice the fact that they were not twins.

-I ’ll tell you what I did.  You poor devil, said I, you are a disgrace to your family.  We must send you to a surgeon and have some kind of a Taliacotian operation performed on you. (You remember the operation as described in Hudibras, of course.) The first thing was to find a subject of similar age and aspect ready to part with one of his members.  So I went to Quidlibet’s,—­you know Quidlibet and that hieroglyphic sign of his with the omniscient-looking eye as its most prominent feature,—­and laid my case before him.  I want you, said I, to look up an old book of mighty little value,—­one of your ten-cent vagabonds would be the sort of thing,—­but an old beggar, with a cover like this, and lay it by for me.

And Quidlibet, who is a pleasant body to deal with,—­only he has insulted one or two gentlemanly books by selling them to me at very low-bred and shamefully insufficient prices,—­Quidlibet, I say, laid by three old books for me to help myself from, and did n’t take the trouble even to make me pay the thirty cents for ’em.  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.