red me a chance to dodge the calendar and enter the
light of day not ours. The morning train of the day I saw in that street
went before the War. I decided to lose it, and visit the shop at the top
of the street, where once you could buy anything from a toddy glass to
an emu's egg having a cameo on it of a ship in full sail. It was also a
second-hand bookshop. Most lovers of such books would have despised it.
It was of little use to go there for valuable editions, or even for such
works as Sowerby's _Botany_. But when last the other man and myself
rummaged in it we found the first volume of the _Boy's Own Paper_, and an
excellent lens for our landscape camera. An alligator, sadly in need of
upholstering, stood at the door, holding old umbrellas and walking-sticks
in its arms. The proprietor, with a sombre nature and a black beard so
like the established shadows of his lumbered premises that he could have
been overlooked for part of the unsalable stock, read Swedenborg, Plato,
Plutarch, and Young's _Night Thoughts_--the latter an edition of the
eighteenth century in which an Edinburgh parson had made frail marginal
comments, yellow and barely discernible, such as: "How True!" This dealer
in lumber read through large goggles, and when he had decided to admit he
knew you were in his shop he bent his head, and questioned you steadily
but without a word over the top of his spectacles. If you showed no real
interest in what you proposed to buy he would refuse to sell it.

There I found him again, still reading--Swedenborg this time--with most
of the old things about him, including the Duck-billed Platypus; for
nobody, apparently, had shown sufficient interest in them. The shop,
therefore, was as I have always known it. There was a spark of a summer's
day of 1914 still burning in the heart of a necromancer's crystal ball on
the upper shelf by the window.

The curio there which was really animated put down his book after I had
been in the shop for some minutes, regarded me deliberately as though
looking to see what change had come to me in four such years, and then
glanced up and nodded to the soothsayer's crystal. "It's a pity," he
said, "that those things won't really work." He asked no questions. He
did not inquire after my friend. He did not refer to those problems which
the crowds in the morning trains were eagerly discussing at that moment.
He sat on a heap of forgotten magazines, and remained apart with
Swedenborg. I loa