some touching on medical knowledge, but principally pathology, and
especially the pathology of the mind.

Yet in spite of this utilitarian bent of my thoughts there are very many
books I know and love and sometimes look into because of their
associations. As I cannot understand (through some mental kink which my
friends are wont to jeer at) how anyone can return again and again to a
book for its own sake, I do not read what I know. As soon would I go
back when it is my purpose to go forward. A book should serve its turn,
do its work, and become a memory. To love books for their own sake is to
be crystallised before old age comes on. Only the old are entitled to
love the past. The work of the young lies in the present and the future.

But still, in spite of my theories, I like to handle, if not to read,
certain books which were read by me under curious and perhaps abnormal
circumstances. If I do not open them it is due to a certain bashfulness,
a subtle dislike of seeing myself as I was. Yet the books I read while
tramping in America, such as _Sartor Resartus_, have the same attraction
for me that a man may feel for a place. I carried the lucubrations of
Teufelsdrockh with me as I wandered; I read them as I camped in the open
upon the prairie; I slipped them into my pocket when I went shepherding
in the Texan plateau south of the Panhandle.

Another book which went with me on my tramps through Minnesota and Iowa
was a tiny volume of Emerson's essays. This I loved less than I loved
Carlyle, and I gave it to a railroad "section boss" in the north-west of
Iowa because he was kind to me. When _Sartor Resartus_ had travelled
with me through the Kicking Horse Pass and over the Selkirks into
British Columbia, and was sucked dry, I gave it at last to a farming
Englishman who lived not far from Kamloops. I remember that in the
flyleaf I kept a rough diary of the terrible week I spent in climbing
through the Selkirk Range with sore and wounded feet. It is perhaps
little wonder that I associate Teufelsdrockh, the mind-wanderer, with
those days of my own life. And yet, unless I live to be old, I shall
never read the book again.

The tramp, or traveller, or beach-comber, or general scallywag finds
little time and little chance to read. And for the most part we must own
he cares little for literature in any form. But I was not always
wandering. I varied wandering with work, and while working at a sawmill
on the coast, or close to i