oves Burgundy or daybreak, this of itself
had been enough to hallow it. But there was more than that. In the Leith
Walk window, all the year round, there stood displayed a theatre in
working order, with a "forest set," a "combat," and a few "robbers
carousing" in the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold to me! the
plays themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon
another. Long and often have I lingered there with empty pockets. One
figure, we shall say, was visible in the first plate of characters,
bearded, pistol in hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I
would spell the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff,
2d dress? O, how I would long to see the rest! how--if the name by
chance were hidden--I would wonder in what play he figured, and what
immortal legend justified his attitude and strange apparel! And then to
go within, to announce yourself as an intending purchaser, and, closely
watched, be suffered to undo those bundles and breathlessly devour those
pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests,
palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses and prison vaults--it was a
giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a
loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it
by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a place besieged; the shopmen,
like the Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the
stick's end, frowned us down, snatched each play out of our hand ere we
were trusted with another; and, incredible as it may sound, used to
demand of us upon our entrance, like banditti, if we came with money or
with empty hand. Old Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my eternal
vacillation, once swept the treasures from before me, with the cry: "I
do not believe, child, that you are an intending purchaser at all!"
These were the dragons of the garden; but for such joys of paradise we
could have faced the Terror of Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered
was another lightning glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like
wallowing in the raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare
with it save now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in
certain unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the
world all vanity. The _crux_ of Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the
uncertainty of the boy as he handled and lingered and doated on these
bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasur
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