When the Offor Collection was put to the hammer by Messrs Sotheby and Wilkinson, the well-known auctioneers of Wellington Street, and when about three days of the sale had been gone through, a Fire occurred in the adjoining house, and, gaining possession of the Sale Rooms, made a speedy end of the unique Bunyan and other rarities then on show.  I was allowed to see the Ruins on the following day, and by means of a ladder and some scrambling managed to enter the Sale Room where parts of the floor still remained.  It was a fearful sight those scorched rows of Volumes still on the shelves; and curious was it to notice how the flames, burning off the backs of the books first, had then run up behind the shelves, and so attacked the fore-edge of the volumes standing upon them, leaving the majority with a perfectly untouched oval centre of white paper and plain print, while the whole surrounding parts were but a mass of black cinders.  The salvage was sold in one lot for a small sum, and the purchaser, after a good deal of sorting and mending and binding placed about 1,000 volumes for sale at Messrs. Puttick and Simpson’s in the following year.

So, too, when the curious old Library which was in a gallery of the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, was nearly destroyed in the fire which devastated the Church in 1862, the books which escaped were sadly injured.  Not long before I had spent some hours there hunting for English Fifteenth-century Books, and shall never forget the state of dirt in which I came away.  Without anyone to care for them, the books had remained untouched for many a decade-damp dust, half an inch thick, having settled upon them!  Then came the fire, and while the roof was all ablaze streams of hot water, like a boiling deluge, washed down upon them.  The wonder was they were not turned into a muddy pulp.  After all was over, the whole of the library, no portion of which could legally be given away, was lent for ever to the Corporation of London.  Scorched and sodden, the salvage came into the hands of Mr. Overall, their indefatigable librarian.  In a hired attic, he hung up the volumes that would bear it over strings like clothes, to dry, and there for weeks and weeks were the stained, distorted volumes, often without covers, often in single leaves, carefully tended and dry-nursed.  Washing, sizing, pressing, and binding effected wonders, and no one who to-day looks upon the attractive little alcove in the Guildhall Library labelled oe “Bibliotheca Ecclesiae Londonino-Belgiae" and sees the rows of handsomely-lettered backs, could imagine that not long ago this, the most curious portion of the City’s literary collections, was in a state when a five-pound note would have seemed more than full value for the lot.

CHAPTER II.

Water.