k-shop
of his family.

In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide, the blacks
and roans and smoked drabs of the low old brick front looked more dingy
to his eye than ever. It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a
dismal and graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift.
It was so little like the antiquity, for example, of Hadlow House, that
the two might have computed their age by the chronological systems of
different planets. Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and
she had been sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years, the sign over the
doorway bore still its century-old legend, "Thorpe, Bookseller."

He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run an eye over the
books and placards exposed on either side of the entrance. A small boy
guarded these wares, and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious
recollections of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that
very spot. The lad under observation had a loutish and sullen face; its
expression could not have been more devoid of intellectual suggestions
if he had been posted in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with
a rattle, instead of being set here in the highway of the world's
brain-movement, an agent of students and philosophers. Thorpe wondered
if in his time he could have looked such a vacant and sour young
fool. No--no. That could not be. Boys were different in his day--and
especially boys in book-shops. They read something and knew something of
what they handled. They had some sort of aspirations, fitful and vague
as these might be, to become in their time bookmen also. And in those
days there still were bookmen--widely-informed, observant, devoted old
bookmen--who loved their trade, and adorned it.

Thorpe reflected that, as he grew older, he was the better able to
apprehend the admirable qualities of that departed race of literature's
servants. Indeed, it seemed that he had never adequately realized before
how proud a man might well be of descending from a line of such men.
The thought struck him that very likely at this identical doorway, two
generations back, a poor, out-at-the-elbows, young law-student named
Plowden had stood and turned over pages of books he could not dream of
buying. Perhaps, even, he had ventured inside, and deferentially picked
acquaintance with the Thorpe of the period, and got bookish advice and
friendly counsel for nothing. It was of no real significance that the
law-st