Yes,—­he said,—­I have a kind of notion of the way in which a library ought to be put together—­no, I don’t mean that, I mean ought to grow.  I don’t pretend to say that mine is a model, but it serves my turn well enough, and it represents me pretty accurately.  A scholar must shape his own shell, secrete it one might almost say, for secretion is only separation, you know, of certain elements derived from the materials of the world about us.  And a scholar’s study, with the books lining its walls, is his shell.  It is n’t a mollusk’s shell, either; it ’s a caddice-worm’s shell.  You know about the caddice-worm?

—­More or less; less rather than more,—­was my humble reply.

Well, sir, the caddice-worm is the larva of a fly, and he makes a case for himself out of all sorts of bits of everything that happen to suit his particular fancy, dead or alive, sticks and stones and small shells with their owners in ’em, living as comfortable as ever.  Every one of these caddice-worms has his special fancy as to what he will pick up and glue together, with a kind of natural cement he provides himself, to make his case out of.  In it he lives, sticking his head and shoulders out once in a while, that is all.  Don’t you see that a student in his library is a caddice-worm in his case?  I’ve told you that I take an interest in pretty much everything, and don’t mean to fence out any human interests from the private grounds of my intelligence.  Then, again, there is a subject, perhaps I may say there is more than one, that I want to exhaust, to know to the very bottom.  And besides, of course I must have my literary harem, my pare aux cerfs, where my favorites await my moments of leisure and pleasure,—­my scarce and precious editions, my luxurious typographical masterpieces; my Delilahs, that take my head in their lap:  the pleasant story-tellers and the like; the books I love because they are fair to look upon, prized by collectors, endeared by old associations, secret treasures that nobody else knows anything about; books, in short, that I like for insufficient reasons it may be, but peremptorily, and mean to like and to love and to cherish till death us do part.

Don’t you see I have given you a key to the way my library is made up, so that you can apriorize the plan according to which I have filled my bookcases?  I will tell you how it is carried out.

In the first place, you see, I have four extensive cyclopaedias.  Out of these I can get information enough to serve my immediate purpose on almost any subject.  These, of course, are supplemented by geographical, biographical, bibliographical, and other dictionaries, including of course lexicons to all the languages I ever meddle with.  Next to these come the works relating to my one or two specialties, and these collections I make as perfect as I can.  Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only on the history of pin-heads.  I don’t mean that I buy all the trashy compilations on my special subjects, but I try to have all the works of any real importance relating to them, old as well as new.  In the following compartment you will find the great authors in all the languages I have mastered, from Homer and Hesiod downward to the last great English name.