Judge Methuen has been a victim (a pleasant victim) to the catalogue habit for the last forty years, and he has declared that if all the catalogues sent to and read by him in that space of time were gathered together in a heap they would make a pile bigger than Pike’s Peak, and a thousandfold more interesting.  I myself have been a famous reader of catalogues, and I can testify that the habit has possessed me of remarkable delusions, the most conspicuous of which is that which produces within me the conviction that a book is as good as mine as soon as I have met with its title in a catalogue, and set an X over against it in pencil.

I recall that on one occasion I was discussing with Judge Methuen and Dr. O’Rell the attempted escapes of Charles I. from Carisbrooke Castle; a point of difference having arisen, I said:  ``Gentlemen, I will refer to Hillier’s `Narrative,’ and I doubt not that my argument will be sustained by that authority.’’

It was vastly easier, however, to cite Hillier than it was to find him.  For three days I searched in my library, and tumbled my books about in that confusion which results from undue eagerness; ’t was all in vain; neither hide nor hair of the desired volume could I discover.  It finally occurred to me that I must have lent the book to somebody, and then again I felt sure that it had been stolen.

No tidings of the missing volume came to me, and I had almost forgotten the incident when one evening (it was fully two years after my discussion with my cronies) I came upon, in one of the drawers of my oak chest, a Sotheran catalogue of May, 1871.  By the merest chance I opened it, and as luck would have it, I opened it at the very page upon which appeared this item: 

``Hillier (G.) `Narrative of the Attempted Escapes of Charles the First from Carisbrooke Castle’; cr. 8vo, 1852, cloth, 3/6.’’

Against this item appeared a cross in my chirography, and I saw at a glance that this was my long-lost Hillier!  I had meant to buy it, and had marked it for purchase; but with the determination and that pencilled cross the transaction had ended.  Yet, having resolved to buy it had served me almost as effectively as though I had actually bought it; I thought—­aye, I could have sworn—­ I had bought it, simply because I meant to buy it.

``The experience is not unique,’’ said Judge Methuen, when I narrated it to him at our next meeting. ``Speaking for myself, I can say that it is a confirmed habit with me to mark certain items in catalogues which I read, and then to go my way in the pleasing conviction that they are actually mine.’’

``I meet with cases of this character continually,’’ said Dr. O’Rell. ``The hallucination is one that is recognized as a specific one by pathologists; its cure is quickest effected by means of hypnotism.  Within the last year a lady of beauty and refinement came to me in serious distress.  She confided to me amid a copious effusion of tears that her husband was upon the verge of insanity.  Her testimony was to the effect that the unfortunate man believed himself to be possessed of a large library, the fact being that the number of his books was limited to three hundred or thereabouts.