thers, familiar
visitors, dropped in with the same comfortable emotion that a man feels
on entering his club. Roger's custom was to sit at his desk in the
rear, puffing his pipe and reading; though if any customer started a
conversation, the little man was quick and eager to carry it on. The
lion of talk lay only sleeping in him; it was not hard to goad it up.

It may be remarked that all bookshops that are open in the evening are
busy in the after-supper hours. Is it that the true book-lovers are
nocturnal gentry, only venturing forth when darkness and silence and
the gleam of hooded lights irresistibly suggest reading? Certainly
night-time has a mystic affinity for literature, and it is strange that
the Esquimaux have created no great books. Surely, for most of us, an
arctic night would be insupportable without O. Henry and Stevenson.
Or, as Roger Mifflin remarked during a passing enthusiasm for Ambrose
Bierce, the true noctes ambrosianae are the noctes ambrose bierceianae.

But Roger was prompt in closing Parnassus at ten o'clock. At that hour
he and Bock (the mustard-coloured terrier, named for Boccaccio) would
make the round of the shop, see that everything was shipshape, empty
the ash trays provided for customers, lock the front door, and turn off
the lights. Then they would retire to the den, where Mrs. Mifflin was
generally knitting or reading. She would brew a pot of cocoa and they
would read or talk for half an hour or so before bed. Sometimes Roger
would take a stroll along Gissing Street before turning in. All day
spent with books has a rather exhausting effect on the mind, and he
used to enjoy the fresh air sweeping up the dark Brooklyn streets,
meditating some thought that had sprung from his reading, while Bock
sniffed and padded along in the manner of an elderly dog at night.

While Mrs. Mifflin was away, however, Roger's routine was somewhat
different. After closing the shop he would return to his desk and with
a furtive, shamefaced air take out from a bottom drawer an untidy
folder of notes and manuscript. This was the skeleton in his closet,
his secret sin. It was the scaffolding of his book, which he had been
compiling for at least ten years, and to which he had tentatively
assigned such different titles as "Notes on Literature," "The Muse on
Crutches," "Books and I," and "What a Young Bookseller Ought to Know."
It had begun long ago, in the days of his odyssey as a rural book
huckster