LIGHTENING THE DARKNESS.
The Lord Mayor has opened a fund to assist the National Institute for the Blind in its endeavour to increase and cheapen the supply of Braille literature.
IN THE BRAVE 3D. DAYS.
In these times of change and stress I have been remembering with much relief a curious character who haunted the British Museum Reading Room a quarter of a century ago. He cannot be there still, for he was elderly then: a military-looking man with a very upright, almost corsetted, form, a reddish face and a gingery moustache that in its prime might have graced a major. His eye however, was not martial, but blue and mild, watery and wandering, its quest being, I fancy, a convivial acquaintance with enough money and generosity for two instalments of refreshment. His hair, which was scanty, was carefully brushed, and parted at the back even to his collar, and upon it was perched at a slight angle a tall hat ironed beyond endurance. His erect body was encased in a tightly-buttoned frock-coat so shiny that it glistened, and as for his boots, no really softhearted observer could bear to look twice at them, so inadequate were they to our city of rain.
Such was this jaunty thread-bare scholar; but what was his special branch of learning I never discovered, nor did he make the discovery easy, for, though he had a desk, it seldom had books upon it, and he was rarely there: drifting instead about the vast room, exchanging a few words with this or that crony, and too often leaving it with them on brief expeditions across the road. He may merely have been a sermon-copyist, busy only towards Sunday. He may have been a loafer pure and simple. I say I don't know; but he was a landmark of the place, idiosyncratic enough to be stamped indelibly on at any rate one retina.
One other touch is needed to complete his appearance. He always wore gloves, which my memory inclines me to believe had once been pale yellow, and he was always accompanied by a copy of The Times. This, however, he did not carry in his hand, but he tucked it between the first and second buttons of his frock-coat, so folded that the title was visible, thus guaranteeing to the world that he was one who went to the fountain-head for his politics and foreign information. By this sign-mark, in spite of the wear and tear which were only too visible in his clothes, he became a man apart, for few regular readers among us could afford such an organ, even if we were attracted by anything so august and severe. But naturally we all thought the more of him for his journal. The suggestion of poverty became merely eccentricity.
And then one day, standing by him closely, I made the humiliating discovery—as humiliating to me as to him—that the date of the protruding copy of The Times was a year or so past, and, looking more narrowly at the paper itself, I realised that it had been folded thus for months and months and months ...
Innocent deception! I wish I had never detected it, and I am glad to think that the gallant old gentleman never knew that it was pierced. But how comforting it is to know that he was well in his grave before the great revolution of this month set in, to reduce his proof of gentility to a penny, and thus reducing it, to render it invalid evermore!
