Of all the merry sayings in which the Bibliotaph indulged himself at the expense of his closest friend this was the most comforting. A gentleman present was complaining that Henry took liberties in correcting his pronunciation. ‘I have no doubt of the occasional need of such correction, but it isn’t often required, and not half so often as he seems to think. I, on the other hand, observe frequent minor slips in his use of language, but I do not feel at liberty to correct him.’
The Bibliotaph began to apply salve to the bruised feelings of the gentleman present as follows: ‘The animus of Henry’s criticism is unquestionably envy. He probably feels how few flies there are in your ointment. While you are astonished that in his case there should be so little ointment for so many flies.’
The Bibliotaph never used slang, and the united recollections of his associates can adduce but two or three instances in which he sunk verbally so low as even to hint slang. He said that there was one town which in his capacity of public speaker he should like to visit. It was a remote village in Virginia where there was a girls’ seminary, the catalogue of which set forth among advantages of location this: that the town was one to which the traveling lecturer and the circus never came. The Bibliotaph said, ‘I should go there. For I am the one when I am on the platform, and by the unanimous testimony of all my friends I am the other when I am off.’
The second instance not only illustrates his ingenuity in trifles, but also shows how he could occasionally answer a friend according to his folly. He had been describing a visit which he had made in the hero-worshiping days of boyhood to Chappaqua; how friendly and good-natured the great farmer-editor was; how he called the Bibliotaph ‘Bub,’ and invited him to stay to dinner; how he stayed and talked politics with his host; how they went out to the barn afterwards to look at the stock; what Greeley said to him and what he said to Greeley,—it was a perfect bit of word-sketching, spontaneous, realistic, homely, unpretentious, irresistibly comic because of the quaintness of the dialogue as reported, and because of the mental image which we formed of this large-headed, round-bellied, precocious youth, who at the age of sixteen was able for three consecutive hours to keep the conversational shuttlecock in the air with no less a person than Horace Greeley. Amid the laughter and comment which followed the narration one mirthful genius who chose for the day to occupy the seat of the scorner, called out to the Bibliotaph:—
‘How old did you say you were at that time, “Bub”?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘And did you wear whiskers?’
The query was insulting. But the Bibliotaph measured the flippancy of the remark with his eye and instantly fitted an answer to the mental needs of the questioner.
‘Even if I had,’ he said, ‘it would have availed me nothing, for in those days there was no wind.’
The Bibliotaph was most at home in the book-shop, on the street, or at his hotel. He went to public libraries only in an emergency, for he was impatient of that needful discipline which compelled him to ask for each volume he wished to see. He had, however, two friends in whose libraries one might occasionally meet him in the days when he hunted books upon this wide continent. One was the gentleman to whom certain letters on literature have been openly addressed, and who has made a library by a process which involves wise selection and infinite self-restraint. This priceless little collection contains no volume which is imperfect, no volume which mars the fine sense of repose begotten in one at the sight of lovely books becomingly clothed, and no volume which is not worthy the name of literature. And there is matter for reflection in the thought that it is not the library of a rich man. Money cannot buy the wisdom which has made this collection what it is, and without self-denial it is hardly possible to give the touch of real elegance to a private library. When dollars are not counted the assemblage of books becomes promiscuous. How may we better describe this library than by the phrase Infinite riches in a little book-case!