She wed with the perfumer's apprentice; but that was so very long

ago that I can pardon, if not forget, the indiscretion. Who
knows where she is to-day? Perhaps a granny beldame in a

Parisian alley; perhaps for years asleep in Pere la Chaise. Come
forth, beloved Beranger, and sing me the old song to make me

young and strong and brave again!
Let them be served on gold--

The wealthy and the great;
Two lovers only want

A single glass and plate!
Ring ding, ring ding,

Ring ding ding--
Old wine, young lassie,

Sing, boys, sing!
XI

DIAGNOSIS OF THE BACILLUS LIBRORUM
For a good many years I was deeply interested in British

politics. I was converted to Liberalism, so-called, by an
incident which I deem well worth relating. One afternoon I

entered a book-shop in High Holborn, and found that the Hon.
William E. Gladstone had preceded me thither. I had never seen

Mr. Gladstone before. I recognized him now by his resemblance to
the caricatures, and by his unlikeness to the portraits which the

newspapers had printed.
As I entered the shop I heard the bookseller ask: ``What books

shall I send?''
To this, with a very magnificent sweep of his arms indicating

every point of the compass, Gladstone made answer: ``Send me
THOSE!''

With these words he left the place, and I stepped forward to
claim a volume which had attracted my favorable attention several

days previous.
``I beg your pardon, sir,'' said the bookseller, politely, ``but

that book is sold.''
``Sold?'' I cried.

``Yes, sir,'' replied the bookseller, smiling with evident pride;
``Mr. Gladstone just bought it; I haven't a book for sale--Mr.

Gladstone just bought them ALL!''
The bookseller then proceeded to tell me that whenever Gladstone

entered a bookshop he made a practice of buying everything in
sight. That magnificent, sweepinggesture of his comprehended

everything--theology, history, social science, folk-lore,
medicine, travel, biography--everything that came to his net was

fish!
``This is the third time Mr. Gladstone has visited me,'' said the

bookseller, ``and this is the third time he has cleaned me out.''
``This man is a good man,'' says I to myself. ``So notable a

lover of books surely cannot err. The cause of home rule must be
a just one after all.''

From others intimately acquainted with him I learned that
Gladstone was an omnivorous reader; that he ordered his books by

the cart-load, and that his home in Hawarden literally overflowed
with books. He made a practice, I was told, of overhauling his

library once in so often and of weeding out such volumes as he
did not care to keep. These discarded books were sent to the

second-hand dealers, and it is said that the dealers not
unfrequently took advantage of Gladstone by reselling him over

and over again (and at advanced prices, too) the very lots of
books he had culled out and rejected.

Every book-lover has his own way of buying; so there are as many
ways of buying as there are purchasers. However, Judge Methuen

and I have agreed that all buyers may be classed in these
following specified grand divisions:

The reckless buyer.
The shrewd buyer.

The timid buyer.
Of these three classes the third is least worthy of our

consideration, although it includes very many lovers of books,
and consequently very many friends of mine. I have actually

known men to hesitate, to ponder, to dodder for weeks, nay,
months over the purchase of a book; not because they did not want

it, nor because they deemed the price exorbitant, nor yet because
they were not abundantly able to pay that price. Their hesitancy

was due to an innate, congenital lack of determination--that same
hideous curse of vacillation which is responsible for so much

misery in human life.
I have made a study of these people, and I find that most of them

are bachelors whose state of singleness is due to the fact that
the same hesitancy which has deprived them of many a coveted

volume has operated to their discomfiture in the matrimonial
sphere. While they deliberated, another bolder than they came

along and walked off with the prize.
One of the gamest buyers I know of was the late John A. Rice of

Chicago. As a competitor at the great auction sales he was
invincible; and why? Because, having determined to buy a book,

he put no limit to the amount of his bid. His instructions to
his agent were in these words: ``I must have those books, no

matter what they cost.''
An English collector found in Rice's library a set of rare

volumes he had been searching for for years.
``How did you happen to get them?'' he asked. ``You bought them

at the Spencer sale and against my bid. Do you know, I told my
buyer to bid a thousand pounds for them, if necessary!''

``That was where I had the advantage of you,'' said Rice,
quietly. ``I specified no limit; I simply told my man to buy the

books.''
The spirit of the collector cropped out early in Rice. I

remember to have heard him tell how one time, when he was a young
man, he was shuffling over a lot of tracts in a bin in front of a

Boston bookstall. His eye suddenly fell upon a little pamphlet
entitled ``The Cow-Chace.'' He picked it up and read it. It was

a poem founded upon the defeat of Generals Wayne, Irving, and
Proctor. The last stanza ran in this wise:

And now I've closed my epic strain,
I tremble as I show it,

Lest this same warrior-drover, Wayne,
Should ever catch the poet.

Rice noticed that the pamphlet bore the imprint of James
Rivington, New York, 1780. It occurred to him that some time

this modest tract of eighteen pages might be valuable; at any
rate, he paid the fifteen cents demanded for it, and at the same

time he purchased for ten cents another pamphlet entitled ``The
American Tories, a Satire.''

Twenty years later, having learned the value of these exceedingly
rare tracts, Mr. Rice sent them to London and had them bound in

Francis Bedford's best style-- ``crimson crushed levant morocco,
finished to a Grolier pattern.'' Bedford's charges amounted to

seventy-five dollars, which with the original cost of the
pamphlets represented an expenditure of seventy-five dollars and

twenty-five cents upon Mr. Rice's part. At the sale of the Rice
library in 1870, however, this curious, rare, and beautiful

little book brought the extraordinary sum of seven hundred and
fifty dollars!

The Rice library contained about five thousand volumes, and it
realized at auction sale somewhat more than seventy-two thousand

dollars. Rice has often told me that for a long time he could
not make up his mind to part with his books; yet his health was

so poor that he found it imperative to retire from business, and