ble perfume, was hidden in this
rude casket. The minds and hearts of the great, laid pitilessly bare, were
here in this one room, shielded merely by pasteboard and cloth.

Far up in the mountains, amid snow-clad steeps and rock-bound fastnesses,
one finds, perchance, a shell. It is so small a thing that it can be held
in the hollow of the hand; so frail that a slight pressure of the finger
will crush it to atoms, yet, held to the ear, it brings the surge and
sweep of that vast, primeval ocean which, in the inconceivably remote
past, covered the peak. And so, to the eye of the mind, the small brown
book, with its hundred printed pages, brings back the whole story of the
world.

A thin, piping voice, to which its fellows have paid no heed, after a time
becomes silent, and, ceaselessly marching, the years pass on by. Yet that
trembling old hand, quietly laid at last upon the turbulent heart, in the
solitude of a garret has guided a pen, and the manuscript is left. Ragged,
worn, blotted, spotted with candle drippings and endlessly interlined, why
should these few sheets of paper be saved?

Because, as it happens, the only record of the period is there--a record
so significant that fifty years can be reconstructed, as an entire
language was brought to light by a triple inscription upon a single stone.
Thrown like the shell upon Time's ever-receding shore, it is,
nevertheless, the means by which unborn thousands shall commune with him
who wrote in his garret, see his whole life mirrored in his book, know his
philosophy, and take home his truth. For by way of the printed page comes
Immortality.

There was no book in the library which had not been read many times. Some
were falling apart, and others had been carefully sewn together and
awkwardly rebound. Still open, on a rickety table in the corner, was that
ponderous volume with an extremely limited circulation: _The Publishers'
Trade List Annual_. Pencilled crosses here and there indicated books to be
purchased, or at least sent on approval, to "customers known to the
House."

"Some day," said Dorothy, "when it's raining and we can't go out, we'll
take down all these books, arrange them in something like order, and
catalogue them."

"How optimistic you are!" remarked Harlan. "Do you think it could be done
in one day?"

"Oh, well," returned Dorothy; "you know what I mean."

Harlan paced restlessly back and forth, pausing now and then to look out
of the window, where