"Precisely. Well, I turn off here. I am going to pay a call upon a gentleman who made a large fortune out of Civilian War Work of National Importance. He has acquired a library, too—quite recently and all at once—beautifully bound in morocco and tree calf. But I doubt if he could quote a single line from a single volume therein. Baxter for me, every time! Good-afternoon."
Secondly, from McAndrew.
"Yon auld felly, Baxter," he suddenly remarked to me one day while driving me home from a professional round, and passing the door of Number Twenty-One; "he's real respeckit in the toon. In Scotland, of course, he would be naebody, for every one's educatit there. But here there's men making as much as seeven pound a week at the Phoenix Linoleum Works, on the south side, that has read naething since they passed through school but the Sabbath newspapers. They look on Baxter as a kin' o' Cyclopedy. But—I was in there the other nicht for a bit crack, and I asked him what he thought of Rabbie Burns. He'd never heard tell of him! There's your Oracle!"
"Mr. Baxter is a self-made man of letters," I said. "He got most of his learning second-hand from the Archdeacon. Perhaps the Archdeacon was not a student of Burns, either."
The enormity of this suggestion quite paralyzed McAndrew for a while. Presently he recovered sufficiently to resume: "Yon Archdeacon was a doited sort of body. He lived all alone in yon dreich-lookin' house in the Cathedral Close nigh fufty year. He had naething aboot him but books, and naebody aboot him but an auld wife, Mistress Corby, and Baxter. She's deid now, but her dochter married on the ironmonger in High Street. It was her was telling me. Mistress Corby did the beds and the cooking, and Baxter did everything else. He redd up the library, and dusted the books. He carried the coals and sorted the garden as weel. And where do you think the Archdeacon got him?"
"Baxter?"
"Aye, Baxter. Singin' in the street! There's few fowk in this toon ken that, or mind it. But Baxter just drufted into the place one wet day, with the toes stickin' oot of his boots, and the Archdeacon found him standin' in the rain and took him intil the hoose and kept him. Twenty-five shillin' a week he got, with two suits of clothes a year and a bit present at Christmas. He bided there thirty years, and the Archdeacon never repented of his bargain. Good servants is scarce."
McAndrew paused impressively, to allow this last truth to sink in, and continued.
"I jalouse the way Baxter got an so weel with the Archdeacon was the interest he took in the library. He was never oot of it, unless he was pitten oot. It wasna so much that he would read the books as worship them. He would take them oot and hold them in his hands by the hour, or sit back on a chair and glower at their backs on the shelves. So Mistress Corby's dochter that married on the ironmonger tellt me."
"By the way, when did Mr. Baxter's granddaughter appear on the scene?" I inquired.