I walked down to the post office (to mail to an editor a sonnet I thought fairly well of) saying to myself:  That book is imported from England, it may be a big book, it may even cost four dollars.  How much better to exhibit the stoic tenacity of all great men, go back to my hall bedroom (which I was temporarily occupying) and concentrate on matters in hand.  What right, I said, has a Buddhist recluse, born either in 1281 or 1283, to harass me so?  But I knew in my heart that the matter was already decided.  I walked back to the corner of Hallbedroom street, and stood vacillating at the newsstand, pretending to glance over the papers.  But across six centuries the insistent ghost of Kenko had me in its grip.  Annoyed, and with a sense of chagrin, I hurried to the subway.

In the dimly lit vestibule of the subway car, a boy of sixteen or so sat on an up-ended suitcase, plunged in a book.  I can never resist the temptation to try to see what books other people are reading.  This innocent curiosity has led me into many rudenesses, for I am short-sighted and have to stare very close to make out the titles.  And usually the people who read books on trolleys, subways and ferries are women.  How often I have stalked them warily, trying to identify the volume without seeming too intrusive.  That weakness deserves an essay in itself.  It has led me into surprising adventures.  But in this case my quarry was easy.  The lad—­I judged him a boarding school boy going back to school after the holidays—­was so absorbed in his reading that it was easy to thrust my face over his shoulder and see the running head on the page—­“The Light That Failed.”

I left the subway at Pennsylvania Station.  Just to appease my conscience, I stopped in at the agreeable Cadmus bookshop on Thirty-third street to see if by any chance they might have a second-hand copy of Kenko.  But I know they wouldn’t; it is not the kind of book at all likely to be found second-hand.  I tarried here long enough to smoke one cigarette and pay my devoirs to the noble profession of second-hand bookselling.  I even thought, a little wildly, of buying a copy of “The Monk” by M.G.  Lewis, which I saw there.  So does the frenzy rage when once you unleash it.  But I decided to be content with paying my devoirs to the proprietor, a friend of mine, and not go on (as the soldier does in Hood’s lovely pun) to devour my pay.  I hurried off to the office of the Oxford University Press, Kenko’s publishers.

It should be stated, however, that owing to some confusion of doors I got by mistake into the reception room of the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Billiard Table Company, which is on the same corridor as the salesroom of the Oxford Press.  It was a pleasant reception room, not very bookish in aspect, but in my agitation I was too eager to feel surprised by the large billiard table in the offing.  I somewhat startled a young man at an adding machine by demanding, in a husky voice, a copy of “The Miscellanies of a Japanese Priest.”  I was rather nervous by this time, lest for some reason I should not be able to buy a copy of Kenko.  I feared the publishers might be angry with me for not having made a round of the bookstores first.  The young man saw that I was chalking the wrong cue, and forwarded me.