Page:The haunted bookshop.djvu/77



she came to see you all her pretty duds on   bringing christmas posies from her mothers garden riding in the tunnel underneath the hudson brother was it rum caused your heart to harden—— }}}}

"What on earth is there funny in that?" said Mrs. Mifflin. "Poor little lamb, I think it was terrible."

"There's more of it," cried Roger, and opened his mouth to continue.

"No more, thank you," said Helen. "There ought to be a fine for using the meter of Love in the Valley that way. I'm going out to market so if the bell rings you'll have to answer it."

Roger added the Archy scrapbook to Miss Titania's shelf, and went on browsing over the volumes he had collected.

"The Nigger of the Narcissus," he said to himself, "for even if she doesn't read the story perhaps she'll read the preface, which not marble nor the monuments of princes will outlive. Dickens' Christmas Stories to introduce her to Mrs. Lirriper, the queen of landladies. Publishers tell me that Norfolk Street, Strand, is best known for the famous literary agent that has his office there, but I wonder how many of them know that that was where Mrs. Lirriper had her immortal lodgings? The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, just to give her a little intellectual jazz. The Wrong Box, because