On my return in May I stopped in New York and spent a day prowling
about the second-hand bookstalls, and spent so much of my money
for books that I had only enough left to carry me to Griffin's
Corners, twelve miles from home. I bought Locke's "Essay on the
Human Understanding," Dr. Johnson's works, Saint-Pierre's "Studies
of Nature," and Dick's works and others. Dick was a Scottish
philosopher whose two big fat volumes held something that caught
my mind as I dipped into them. But I got little from him and soon
laid him aside. On this and other trips to New York I was always
drawn by the second-hand bookstalls. How I hovered about them,
how good the books looked, how I wanted them all! To this day,
when I am passing them, the spirit of those days lays its hand
upon me, and I have to pause a few moments and, half-dreaming,
half-longing, run over the titles. Nearly all my copies of the
English classics I have picked up at these curbstone stalls. How
much more they mean to me than new books of later years! Here,
for instance, are two volumes of Dr. Johnson's works in good leather
binding, library style, which I have carried with me from one place
to another for over fifty years, and which in my youth I read and
reread, and the style of which I tried to imitate before I was
twenty.
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