Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/431

391 THOMAS TEGG. 391 scepticism, and my atheism remain to be written." It is said that he was first awakened to a better way of thinking, in the following manner: One day, walking in the country, he saw a little girl standing at a door- way, and stopped to ask her for a drink of milk; and, observing a book in her hand, he inquired what it was. She said it was a Bible ; and, in reply to some depreciatory remark of his, added, in her simple wonder "I thought everybody loved their Bible, sir!" By this time Tegg was thriving ; he bought his first great-coat, and the first silk pelisse for his wife, and was able to make a rule of paying in cash, which he found an immense advantage. The book auctions, continued nightly at 1 1 1, Cheapside, formed the immediate stepping-stone to his wealth. He visited all the trade sales, and bought up the " remainders," i.e., surplus copies of works in which the original publishers had no faith; "I was," he writes, "the broom that swept the booksellers' warehouses." At one of the dinners preceding these trade sales, he heard Alderman Cadell give the then famous toast " The Bookseller's four B's "Burns, Blair, Buchan, and Blackstone. In the auctioneer's rostrum he was very lively and amusing, and the room became well known all over London. At one of the last sales, a gentleman who purchased a book asked if "he ever left off selling for a single night ?" Fifteen years before, on his road to the dock to embark for Calcutta, he found Tegg busy, and as busy still on his return. " If ever man was devoted to his profession, I am that man," says Tegg ; and again " I feel that my moral courage is sufficient to carry out anything I resolve to accomplish." Now that his own publications were proving very