And a queer lot they were who listened, and a queer lot they had to be, to enjoy Kelsey’s confidence.  “Men are like books,” he would often say to Felix.  “It is their insides I care for, no matter how badly they are bound.  The half-calf or all-morocco sort never appeal to me.  Shelf fellows seldom handled, I call them, and a man who is not handled and rubbed up against, with a corner worn off here and there, is like a book kept under glass.  Nobody cares anything about it except as an ornament, and I have no room for ornaments.”

That is why the door was kept shut at night, when some half-calf rapped and Tim would get a look at his binding through the shutter and tiptoe back, closing the door of the inner room behind him.

Among Kelsey’s collection was old Silas Murford, the custom-house clerk—­a fat, stupid-looking old fellow whose chin rested on his shirt-front and whose middle rested on his knees, the whole of him, when seated, filling Tim’s biggest chair.  Tim prized this volume most, for when Silas began to talk, the sheepish look would fade out of his placid face, his little pig eyes would vanish, and the listener would discover to his astonishment that not only was this lethargic lump of flesh a delightful conversationalist but that he had spent every hour he could spare from his custom-house in a study of the American system of immigration—­ and had at his tongue’s end a mass of statistics about which few men knew anything.

Crackburn, an authority on the earlier printers, then in charge of the prints in the Astor Library, and who, for diversion, ground lenses on the sly, was another prize document.  And so was Lockwood, the lapidary, famous as a designer of medals and seals; and many more such oddities.  “Fine old copies,” Kelsey would say of them, “hand-printed, all of them; one or two, like old Silas, extremely rare.”

That he considered Felix entitled to a place in his private collection had been decided at their first meeting.  “Met a mask with a man behind it,” he had announced to his intimates that same night.  “Got a fine nose for what’s worth having.  Located that chant book as soon as he laid his hands on it.  I didn’t get any farther than the skin of his face and you won’t, either.  He has promised to come over, and when you have rubbed up against him for half an hour, as I did this morning, you will think as I do.”

Since that time, Felix had spent many comforting hours in Kelsey’s little back room.  Sometimes he would drop in about nine and remain until half past ten; at other times, it would be nearer midnight before he would turn the knob.

As for the shop itself, nothing up and down “The Avenue” was quite as odd, quite as ramshackly, or quite as picturesque.  What the public saw, on either side of the down-two-steps entrance, was a bench with slanting shelves, holding a double row of books and two patched glass windows, protecting disordered heaps of prints, stained engravings, and old etchings, the whole embedded in dust.