Any reassembling of the books might
spoil the colour-scheme. Baedeker's Switzerland and Villette are
both in red, a colour which is neatly caught up again, after an
interlude in blue, by a volume of Browning and Jevons' Elementary
Logic. We had a woman here only yesterday who said, "How pretty
your books look," and I am inclined to think that that is good
enough. There is a careless rapture about them which I should
lose if I started to arrange them methodically.
But perhaps I might risk this to the extent of getting all their
heads the same way up. Yes, on one of these fine days (or wet
nights) I shall take my library seriously in hand. There are
still one or two books which are the wrong way round. I shall put
them the right way round.
The Chase
The fact, as revealed in a recent lawsuit, that there is a
gentleman in this country who spends ?10,000 a year upon his
butterfly collection would have disturbed me more in the early
nineties than it does to-day. I can bear it calmly now, but
twenty-five years ago the knowledge would have spoilt my pride in
my own collection, upon which I was already spending the best
part of threepence a week pocket-money. Perhaps, though, I should
have consoled myself with the thought that I was the truer
enthusiast of the two; for when my rival hears of a rare
butterfly in Brazil, he sends a man out to Brazil to capture it,
whereas I, when I heard that there was a Clouded Yellow in the
garden, took good care that nobody but myself encompassed its
death.
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