If ever, O honest friends of mine, I should forget you or weary of your companionship, whither would depart the memories and the associations with which each of you is hallowed!  Would ever the modest flowers of spring-time, budding in pathways where I no longer wander, recall to my failing sight the vernal beauty of the Puritan maid, Captivity?  In what reverie of summer-time should I feel again the graciousness of thy presence, Yseult?

And Fanchonette—­sweet, timid little Fanchonette! would ever thy ghost come back from out those years away off yonder?  Be hushed, my Beranger, for a moment; another song hath awakened softly responsive echoes in my heart!  It is a song of Fanchonette: 

      In vain, in vain; we meet no more,
      Nor dream what fates befall;
  And long upon the stranger’s shore
      My voice on thee may call,
  When years have clothed the line in moss
      That tells thy name and days,
  And withered, on thy simple cross,
      The wreaths of Pere la Chaise!

XVI

THE MALADY CALLED CATALOGITIS

Judge Methuen tells me that one of the most pleasing delusions he has experienced in his long and active career as a bibliomaniac is that which is born of the catalogue habit.  Presuming that there are among my readers many laymen,—­for I preach salvation to the heathen,—­I will explain for their information that the catalogue habit, so called, is a practice to which the confirmed lover of books is likely to become addicted.  It is a custom of many publishers and dealers to publish and to disseminate at certain periods lists of their wares, in the hope of thereby enticing readers to buy those wares.

By what means these crafty tradesmen secure the names of their prospective victims I cannot say, but this I know full well—­that there seems not to be a book-lover on the face of the earth, I care not how remote or how secret his habitation may be, that these dealers do not presently find him out and overwhelm him with their delightful temptations.

I have been told that among booksellers there exists a secret league which provides for the interchange of confidences; so that when a new customer enters a shop in the Fulham road or in Oxford street or along the quays of Paris, or it matters not where (so long as the object of his inquiry be a book), within the space of a month that man’s name and place of residence are reported to and entered in the address list of every other bookseller in Christendom, and forthwith and forever after the catalogues and price-lists and bulletins of publishers and dealers in every part of the world are pelted at him through the unerring processes of the mails.