loomfield, and Pope. Now I am sure that Pope is just the kind of poet
whose verses you would read magnificently. Shall we explore the
bookcase together?"

Now if there is any manner of beguiling an idle afternoon, which seems
to me most delightful, it is by the exploration of old bookcases; and
when that delight can be shared by the woman one fondly loves, the
pleasure thereof must be of course multiplied to an indefinite amount.

So Charlotte and I set to work immediately to ransack the lower shelves
of the old-fashioned mahogany bookcase, which contained the entire
library of the Mercer household.

I am bound to admit that we did not light upon many volumes of
thrilling interest. The verses of Cowper, like those of Southey, have
always appeared to me to have only one fault--there are too many of
them. One shrinks appalled from that thick closely-printed volume of
morality cut into lengths of ten feet; and beyond the few well-worn
quotations in daily use, I am fain to confess that I am almost a
stranger to the bard of Olney.

Half a dozen odd volumes of the _Gentleman's Magazine_, three or four
of the _Annual Register_, a neatly-bound edition of _Clarissa Harlowe_
and _Sir Charles Grandison_ in twelve volumes, Law's _Holy Call to a
Serious Life_, _Paradise Lost_, _Joseph Andrews_, _Hervey's
Meditations_, and _Gulliver's Travels_, formed the varied contents of
the principal shelves. Above, there were shabbily-bound volumes and
unbound pamphlets. Below, there were folios, the tops whereof were
thickly covered with the dust of ages, having escaped the care of the
handmaidens even in that neatly-appointed household.

I knelt down to examine these.

"You'll be covered with dust if you touch them," cried Charlotte. "I
was once curious enough to examine them, but the result was very
disappointing."

"And yet they look so delightfully mysterious," I said. "This one, for
instance?"

"That is an old history of London, with curious plates and maps; rather
interesting if one has nothing more amusing to read. But the perennial
supply of novels from Mudie's spoils one for that kind of book."

"If ever I come to Newhall again, I shall dip into the old history. One
is never tired of dead and gone London. But after Mr. Knight's
delightful book any old history must seem very poor. What is my burly
friend here?"

"O, a dreadful veterinary-surgeon's encyclopaedia--_The Farmer's
Friend_ I think it is called; all about the ailm