course of the river Wein; nondescript indescribable twaddling local
books in Italian, Spanish, queer French, written and printed in some
unknown foreign village; read them--you might as well try to amuse
yourself with a Chinese pamphlet! What earthly value they are of cannot
be discovered. They were composed by authors whose names are gone like
the sand washed by the Nile into the sea before Herodotus. They contain
no beautiful poetry, no elevated thought, no scientific discovery; they
are simply so much paper, printing, and binding, so many years old, and
it is for that age, printing, and binding that the money is paid.

I have read a good many books in my time--I would not give sixpence for
the whole lot.

They are not like a block-book--first efforts at printing; nor like the
first editions of great authors; there is not the slightest intrinsic
value in them whatever.

Yet some of them fetch prices which not long ago were thought tremendous
even for the Shakespeare folio.

Hundreds and hundreds of pounds are paid for them. Living and writing
authors of the present day are paid in old songs by comparison.

Still, this enormous value set on old books is one of the remarkable
signs of the day. If any one wishes to know what To-Day is, these
book-auctions are of the things he should go to see.

Such books as these lined Grandfather Iden's shelves; among them there
were a few that I call _real_ old books, an early translation or two, an
early Shakespeare, and once there had been a very valuable Boccaccio,
but this had gone into Lord Pamment's library, "Presented by James
Bartholomew Iden, Esq."

The old man often went to look at and admire his Boccaccio in my Lord's
library.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XI.

THERE was one peculiarity in all the books on Grandfather Iden's
shelves, they were all very finely bound in the best style of hand-art,
and they all bore somewhere or other a little design of an ancient Roman
lamp.

Hand-art is a term I have invented for the workmanship of good taste--it
is not the sculptor's art, nor the painter's--not the art of the mind,
but the art of the hand. Some furniture and cabinet work, for instance,
some pottery, book-binding like this, are the products of hand-art.

"Do you see the Lamp?" asked the old man, when Amaryllis had stared
sufficiently at the backs of the books.

"Yes, I can see the Lamp."

"House of Flamma," said old Iden.

"House of Flamma," rep