winter, it appeared,
some relative, far or near, sent him a large batch of mince pies, twenty
or thirty at least. He once spoke to me of having laid in his winter
pie, just as another might speak of laying in his winter coal. The
only fireside companion Tom Folio ever alluded to in my presence was
a Maltese cat, whose poor health seriously disturbed him from time to
time. I suspected those mince pies. The cat, I recollect, was named Miss
Mowcher.

If he had any immediate family ties beyond this I was unaware of
them, and not curious to be enlightened on the subject. He was more
picturesque solitary. I preferred him to remain so. Other figures
introduced into the background of the canvas would have spoiled the
artistic effect.

Tom Folio was a cheerful, lonely man--a recluse even when he allowed
himself to be jostled and hurried along on the turbulent stream of
humanity sweeping in opposite directions through Washington Street and
its busy estuaries. He was in the crowd, but not of it. I had so little
real knowledge of him that I was obliged to imagine his more intimate
environments. However wide of the mark my conjectures may have fallen,
they were as satisfying to me as facts would have been. His secluded
room I could picture to myself with a sense of certainty--the couch (a
sofa by day), the cupboard, the writing-table with its student lamp, the
litter of pamphlets and old quartos and octavos in tattered bindings,
among which were scarce reprints of his beloved Charles Lamb, and
perhaps--nay, surely--an _editio princeps_ of the "Essays."

The gentle Elia never had a gentler follower or a more loving disciple
than Tom Folio. He moved and had much of his being in the early part
of the last century. To him the South-Sea House was the most important
edifice on the globe, remaining the same venerable pile it used to be,
in spite of all the changes that had befallen it. It was there Charles
Lamb passed the novitiate of his long years of clerkship in the East
India Company. In Tom Folio's fancy a slender, boyish figure was still
seated, quill in hand, behind those stately porticoes looking upon
Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. That famous first paper in the
"Essays," describing the South-Sea House and the group of human oddities
which occupied desks within its gloomy chambers, had left an indelible
impression upon the dreamer. Every line traced by the "lean annuitant"
was as familiar to Tom Folio as if he had written