A Book Room

THERE are rooms with books in them, there are book‐rooms, and there are libraries. Every book‐lover will recognise these statements as solemnly true. It seems to me that the real library might be known by a blind man: for it smells like a library: it speaks at once of old leather and ancient glue and calf and morocco binding and has in it the very fume of history and the passage of time. Blessed are those who possess one and the capacity of enjoying its odorous sanctity. This is not given to many. I am not of that high order. True that I have some rooms with books in them, but such can satisfy none but meagre souls. As I was brought up among books I have over and above these a book‐room in which nothing really counts but books at which good people hasten to peer, while the unitiated merely wonder.