"Why, Henry, lad, whoever expected to see you! Your aunt's out at present; but she'll be back soon. Come into the parlour."
"If you don't mind, Uncle Tipping, I'd rather come upstairs with you. I love the smell of the leather and the sight of all those sharp little knives, and the black, shiny 'dubbin,' do you call it? And we can have a talk about books till aunt comes home."
"All right, lad. But it's a dusty place, and there's hardly a corner to sit down in."
So up they went to a little room where, in a chaos of boots mended on one hand, and boots to mend on the other, sheets of leather lying about, in one corner a great tubfull of water in which the leather was soaked,--an old boyish fascination of Henry's,--Mr. Tipping spent the greater part of his days. He sat on a low bench near a window, along which ran a broad sill full of tools. On this, too, lay an opened book, into which Mr. Tipping would dip now and again, when he could safely leave the boot he was engaged upon to the mechanical skill of his hands. At one end of the tool-shelf was a small collection of books, a dozen or so shabby volumes, though these were far from constituting Mr. Tipping's complete library.
Mr. Tipping belonged to that pathetic army of book-lovers who subsist on the refuse of the stalls, which he hunted not for rare editions, but for the sheer bread of life, or rather the stale crusts of knowledge. His tastes were not literary in the special sense of the word. For belles-lettres he had no fancy, and fine passages, except in so far as they were controversial, left him cold. His mind was primarily scientific, secondarily philosophic, and occasionally historic. Travels and books of physical science were the finds for which, mainly, he rummaged the stalls. At the moment his pet study was astronomy; and a curious apparatus in one of the corners, which Henry had noticed as he entered, was his sad attempt to rig up a telescope for himself.
"It's not so bad as it looks," he said, pointing it out; "but then," he added, with a smile half sad and half humorous, "there are not many stars to be seen from Tichborne Street."
It was a touching characteristic of the type of bookman to which Mr. Tipping belonged, that the astronomy from which he was reading by no means embodied the latest discoveries. In fact, it narrowly escaped being eighteenth-century science, for it was dated very early in the eighteen hundreds. But an astronomy was an astronomy to Mr. Tipping; and had Copernicus been born late enough, he would most certainly have imbibed Ptolemaic doctrines with grateful unsuspicion. Indeed, had it been put to him: "This astronomy after Copernicus at half-a-crown, and this after Ptolemy for sixpence," his means alone would have left him no choice. It is so the old clothes of the mind, like the old clothes of the body,--superseded science, forgotten philosophy,--find a market, and a book remains a book, with the power of comforting or diverting some indigent, poor soul, so long as the stitching holds it together.
Presently there was a knock at the front door.
"There's your aunt," said Mr. Tipping; and, as the door opened, the little maid-of-all-work was to be heard whispering her mistress that a young gentleman who said he was her nephew had come and was upstairs with "the master."
"Well, I never!" exclaimed Mrs. Tipping, immediately starting upstairs towards the open door of the cobblery.