of imagination, from dust and heat to the dear mountain air. ``We are only the children who might have been,’’ murmured Lamb’s dream babes to him; and for the sake of those dream-journeys, the journeys that might have been, I still hail with a certain affection the call of the engine in the night:  even as I love sometimes to turn the enchanted pages of the railway a b c, and pass from one to the other name reminiscent or suggestive of joy and freedom, Devonian maybe, or savouring of Wessex, or bearing me away to some sequestered reach of the quiet Thames.

Non Libri Sed Liberi

It will never be clear to the lay mind why the book-buyer buys books.  That it is not to read them is certain:  the closest inspection always fails to find him thus engaged.  He will talk about them —­ all night if you let him —­ wave his hand to them, shake his fist at them, shed tears over them (in the small hours of the morning); but he will not read them.  Yet it would be rash to infer that he buys his books without a remote intention of ever reading them.  Most book lovers start with the honest resolution that some day they will ``shut down on’’ this fatal practice.  Then they purpose to themselves to enter into their charmed circle, and close the gates of Paradise behind them.  Then will they read out of nothing but first editions; every day shall be a debauch in large paper and tall copies; and crushed morocco shall be familiar to their touch as buckram.  Meanwhile, though, books continue to flaunt their venal charms; it would be cowardice to shun the fray.  In fine, one buys and continues to buy; and the promised Sabbath never comes.

The process of the purchase is always much the same, therein resembling the familiar but inferior passion of love.  There is the first sight of the Object, accompanied of a catching of the breath, a trembling in the limbs, loss of appetite, ungovernable desire, and a habit of melancholy in secret places.  But once possessed, once toyed with amorously for an hour or two, the Object (as in the inferior passion aforesaid) takes its destined place on the shelf —­ where it stays.  And this saith the scoffer, is all; but even he does not fail to remark with a certain awe that the owner goeth thereafter as one possessing a happy secret and radiating an inner glow.  Moreover, he is insufferably conceited, and his conceit waxeth as his coat, now condemned to a fresh term of servitude, groweth shabbier.  And shabby though his coat may be, yet will he never stoop to renew its pristine youth and gloss by the price of any book.  No man —­ no human, masculine, natural man —­ ever sells a book.  Men have been known in moments of thoughtlessness, or compelled by temporary necessity, to rob, to equivocate, to do murder, to commit what they should not, to ``wince and relent and refrain’’ from what they should:  these things, howbeit regrettable, are common to humanity, and may happen to any of us.  But amateur bookselling is foul and unnatural; and it is noteworthy that our language, so capable of particularity, contains no distinctive name for the crime.  Fortunately it is hardly known to exist:  the face of the public being set against it as a flint —­ and the trade giving such wretched prices.