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 still reading the first. When we went gayly to buy Volume II, lo! it was gone.

Clark Russell is there, with his snowy canvassed yachts dipping and creaming through azure seas; and once in a while a tattered Frank Stockton or a "Female Poets of America" or "The Mysteries of Udolpho." We have learned more about books from Ludlow street than ever we did in any course at college. We remember how we used to hasten thither on Saturday afternoons during our college days and, fortified with an automatic sandwich and a cup of coffee, we would spend a delirious three hours plundering the jeweled caves of joy. Best of all are the wet days when the rain drums on the little shelter-roof and drips down the back of the fanatic. But what true fanatic heeds a chilled spine when his head is warmed by all the fires of Olympus?

Ludlow street has quiet sorrows of its own, however. At the end of the ten-cent shelves, redeemed and exalted, even intoxicated by these draughts of elixir, it staggers a little in its gait. It takes a wild reeling twist round behind Leary's, clinging to that fortress of the Muses as long as it may. And then comes the thorn in its crown. Just as it has begun to fancy itself as a highbrow pathway to Helicon, it finds itself wearing against its sober brick wall one of the Street Cleaning Department's fantastic and long-neglected ash piles. This abashes the poor little street so that when it strikes Eighth street it becomes confused, totters