gladness you know nothing about now There, I have done for a little while.  I won’t pledge myself for more, I assure you.  For to speak about such things is the greatest delight of my age, as it was of my early manhood, next to that of loving God and my neighbour.  For as these are the two commandments of life, so they are in themselves the pleasures of life.  But there I am at it again.  I beg your pardon now, for I have already inadvertently broken my promise.

I had allowed myself a half-hour before the fire with my glass of wine and piece of bread, and I soon fell into a dreamy state called reverie, which I fear not a few mistake for thinking, because it is the nearest approach they ever make to it.  And in this reverie I kept staring about my book-shelves.  I am an old man now, and you do not know my name; and if you should ever find it out, I shall very soon hide it under some daisies, I hope, and so escape; and therefore, I am going to be egotistic in the most unpardonable manner.  I am going to tell you one of my faults, for it continues, I fear, to be one of my faults still, as it certainly was at the period of which I am now writing.  I am very fond of books.  Do not mistake me.  I do not mean that I love reading.  I hope I do.  That is no fault—­a virtue rather than a fault.  But, as the old meaning of the word fond was foolish, I use that word:  I am foolishly fond of the bodies of books as distinguished from their souls, or thought-element.  I do not say I love their bodies as divided from their souls; I do not say I should let a book stand upon my shelves for which I felt no respect, except indeed it happened to be useful to me in some inferior way.  But I delight in seeing books about me, books even of which there seems to be no prospect that I shall have time to read a single chapter before I lay this old head down for the last time.  Nay, more:  I confess that if they are nicely bound, so as to glow and shine in such a fire-light as that by which I was then sitting, I like them ever so much the better.  Nay, more yet—­and this comes very near to showing myself worse than I thought I was when I began to tell you my fault:  there are books upon my shelves which certainly at least would not occupy the place of honour they do occupy, had not some previous owner dressed them far beyond their worth, making modern apples of Sodom of them.  Yet there I let them stay, because they are pleasant to the eye, although certainly not things to be desired to make one wise.  I could say a great deal more about the matter, pro and con, but it would be worse than a sermon, I fear.  For I suspect that by the time books, which ought to be loved for the truth that is in them, of one sort or another, come to be loved as articles of furniture, the mind has gone through a process more than analogous to that which the miser’s mind goes through—­namely, that of passing from the respect of money because