Things Found in Books

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

WHAT queer variety of things we sometimes come across in books long undisturbed — besides what the authors and the printers put there ! I have just opened that delightful book, Murray on the Origin and Growth of the Psalms, and there stares me in the face a number of blue prints taken by one of my son son the gulf-side and on the bayside of Galveston Island, — pictures that bring back many reminiscences. Lovely sea-and-cloud views some of them are, with the clumps of tamarisk in the foreground, and the beach, below the sanddunes on which these grow, stretching down to the surf. These call to mind a breeze-blown summer spent partly in that fatal Lucas Terrace, in whose ruins the storm of 1900 buried so many, and partly in a tent close beside one of those jungles of salt-cedar. Ah! those days and nights! The bay-side sketches are of Bremen steamers and Galveston wharves, and speak not so strongly to the memory.

Another book, opened at random, will reveal a leaf or flower pressed long ago, “ in the time of the Barmecides,” after a tramp in the woods near Oxford, Mississippi, or along the banks of the Congaree in South Carolina, or beside the Kinchatoonee in Georgia. One calls up a black sluggish stream, in the reedy thicknesses of whose margin shone forth suddenly a gemlike flower, a full reward for heated cheeks and dusty feet, helping the dense shade of the woods to bring coolness and rest to the youngest of the wanderers. Another takes us back to the fern-covered bank, to which we so often turned our steps to search for the earliest anemones, or to gather in the tiny glen near it our richest treasure of golden lady-slippers. Still another tribute of our travels recalls the slow voyage in fairy waters on the gulf-coast of Florida and the wonderful seaweed forms fished up from a coral sea-bottom.

Take in hand that bulky volume, so seldom lifted from its shelf, and it will open of itself at the place where was thrust long ago the wedding invitation of our lively and charming friend who helped to make a Shakespeare Club in Cuthbert, Georgia, so interesting. But the puccoon flower we showed her, as the earliest transport of spring in the woods beside the mill-pond, will be found in another book, — perchance in that Browning our eldest used to pore over with such zest.

It is a bad plan to hide away precious things thus, for our old loves so often cease to draw us to their pages. Long years have passed since I opened a volume of my once beloved Noctes Ambrosianæ. Shall I try the experiment now ? Henry Rogers in the Eclipse of Faith mentions the curious circumstance of a large sum of money in bank bills being found in a family Bible where they had been hidden under the conviction that that book would be unlikely ever to be opened by any one but the secret depositor. Let me not be so fond as to imagine treasure in these lucubrations of Kit North. There will be no twenty-dollar bill found there, I warrant you : never was there one of us so insensate as to slip money into a book, —we spend all we get too fast for that. But, hey! this is a photograph, long forgotten. Can it be anybody’s sweetheart ? I would fain hope not, — no, not even a cousin or a friend, let us trust! Indeed, it is hard to remember for whom it is meant.

Is it my Greek books you are looking at ? It is ages since I have touched them. Scholarship is out of fashion nowadays. There must come a need for a new Renaissance before Hellenic studies will come into vogue again. But do you imagine that anything striking will be found in these ? Let me turn the pages of this Antigone and try a new kind of “ Sortes Vergilianæ.” Sure enough! there is a flutter of falling paper, — a cutting from an old Times-Democrat, I opine. It is one of the most imaginative of Mrs. Margaret J. Preston’s lyrics. My daughter must have put it there, besides recording the verses in her memory, for I have heard her repeat them often. But why put them into the Antigone ? It was the nearest book at hand, no doubt, and it was the merest chance that laid our poet’s pretty fancies side by side with the tragic lines of Sophocles.

As yet I have said nothing of the marginal notes, the multitudinous scribblings, which now disfigure and now illuminate books. Who is not familiar with them ? And with what different emotions do we come upon the different sorts !

When they are the notes of scholars, we welcome them as noteworthy, possibly precious commentaries on the text. I well remember a fine copy of Horace, once in my possession, which had belonged to that eminent scholar and essayist, Hugh Swinton Legaré, and was thickly strewn with notes in his handwriting. Alas, it is now no more, having perished in that Galveston storm already mentioned. I had given it to an appreciative scholar, whose life went out with the downfall of Lucas Terrace ; and all his possessions were buried under its ruins.

But, when the inscriptions on margin or blank page of the book you have in hand are the merest rubbish, the silly outpourings of a fool’s too ample leisure, you fume with unuttered execrations on his memory, or laugh loudly at his idiocy, as the mood of the moment may move you.

I have an old French Bible, printed at Basle in 1760, which has some interesting matter inscribed on the blank pages of front and back. One of these inscriptions runs thus, — I give the spelling of the original, —

“ Cette petite Bible est à moi Jean Bert Si je la viens a perdre Celui qui la Trouvera qui aije la bonté de me la Rendre jelui donneray une Raisonable Trouvieré [evidently a provincial word signifying ‘ finder’s reward,’ perhaps originally trouveuré] car c’est un Livre pour me conssoller et pour m’aprandre à quiter le vice et m’atacher à la vertú Cesser de mal faire apprandre à bien faire fuir le mal et m atacher au bien quiter lidolatrie du monde pour m’atacher au pur Service de Dieu.”

At the back of the book in another hand and in paler ink, now almost illegible, are rhymed verses that constitute a confession of faith, the first line being: —

“ J’abjure de bon coeur le Pape et son Empire,”

showing the writer to have been as sound a Huguenot as Jean Bert, the first owner of the book.

Sometimes one has surprises. In the textbook of one of my students I once hit upon a capital caricature of myself.