—­Give him a good-natured adjective or two if I can, and thank him, and tell him I am lying under a sense of obligation to him.

—­That is as good an excuse for lying as almost any,—­I said.

—­Yes, but look out for the fellows that send you a copy of their book to trap you into writing a bookseller’s advertisement for it.  I got caught so once, and never heard the end of it and never shall hear it.—–­He took down an elegantly bound volume, on opening which appeared a flourishing and eminently flattering dedication to himself.—–­There,—­said he, what could I do less than acknowledge such a compliment in polite terms, and hope and expect the book would prove successful, and so forth and so forth?  Well, I get a letter every few months from some new locality where the man that made that book is covering the fences with his placards, asking me whether I wrote that letter which he keeps in stereotype and has kept so any time these dozen or fifteen years.  Animus tuus oculus, as the freshmen used to say.  If her Majesty, the Queen of England, sends you a copy of her “Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands,” be sure you mark your letter of thanks for it Private!

We had got comfortably seated in his library in the mean time, and the Master had taken up his book.  I noticed that every other page was left blank, and that he had written in a good deal of new matter.

—­I tell you what,—­he said,—­there ’s so much intelligence about nowadays in books and newspapers and talk that it’s mighty hard to write without getting something or other worth listening to into your essay or your volume.  The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.  Every now and then I find something in my book that seems so good to me, I can’t help thinking it must have leaked in.  I suppose other people discover that it came through a leak, full as soon as I do.  You must write a book or two to find out how much and how little you know and have to say.  Then you must read some notices of it by somebody that loves you and one or two by somebody that hates you.  You ’ll find yourself a very odd piece of property after you ’ve been through these experiences.  They ’re trying to the constitution; I’m always glad to hear that a friend is as well as can be expected after he ’s had a book.

You must n’t think there are no better things in these pages of mine than the ones I’m going to read you, but you may come across something here that I forgot to say when we were talking over these matters.

He began, reading from the manuscript portion of his book: