ntryman the first news of the devastation of his
Capital.

When the Offor Collection was put to the hammer by Messrs Sotheby and
Wilkinson, the well-known auctioneers of Wellington Street, and when
about three days of the sale had been gone through, a Fire occurred in
the adjoining house, and, gaining possession of the Sale Rooms, made a
speedy end of the unique Bunyan and other rarities then on show. I was
allowed to see the Ruins on the following day, and by means of a ladder
and some scrambling managed to enter the Sale Room where parts of the
floor still remained. It was a fearful sight those scorched rows of
Volumes still on the shelves; and curious was it to notice how the
flames, burning off the backs of the books first, had then run up behind
the shelves, and so attacked the fore-edge of the volumes standing upon
them, leaving the majority with a perfectly untouched oval centre of
white paper and plain print, while the whole surrounding parts were but
a mass of black cinders. The salvage was sold in one lot for a small
sum, and the purchaser, after a good deal of sorting and mending and
binding placed about 1,000 volumes for sale at Messrs. Puttick and
Simpson's in the following year.

So, too, when the curious old Library which was in a gallery of the
Dutch Church, Austin Friars, was nearly destroyed in the fire which
devastated the Church in 1862, the books which escaped were sadly
injured. Not long before I had spent some hours there hunting for
English Fifteenth-century Books, and shall never forget the state of
dirt in which I came away. Without anyone to care for them, the books
had remained untouched for many a decade-damp dust, half an inch thick,
having settled upon them! Then came the fire, and while the roof was
all ablaze streams of hot water, like a boiling deluge, washed down upon
them. The wonder was they were not turned into a muddy pulp. After all
was over, the whole of the library, no portion of which could legally be
given away, was _lent for ever_ to the Corporation of London. Scorched
and sodden, the salvage came into the hands of Mr. Overall, their
indefatigable librarian. In a hired attic, he hung up the volumes that
would bear it over strings like clothes, to dry, and there for weeks and
weeks were the stained, distorted volumes, often without covers, often
in single leaves, carefully tended and dry-nursed. Washing, sizing,
pressing, and binding effected wonders, and no one who to-day lo