COUNTRY LITERATURE. 223 



cheap books than pedlars and gipsy women. Coming 

 in thence to those larger villages which possess a 

 market and are called towns — often only one long 

 street — there is generally a sort of curiosity shop, 

 kept perhaps by a cobbler, a carver and gilder, or 

 brazier, where odds and ends, as old guns and pistols, 

 renovated umbrellas, a stray portmanteau, rusty 

 fenders, and so forth, are for sale. Inside the window 

 are a few old books, with the brown and faded gilt 

 covers so common in days gone by, and on market 

 days these are put outside on the window-sill, or 

 perhaps a plank on trestles forming a bookstall. The 

 stray customers have hardly any connection with 

 the growing taste for reading, being people a little 

 outside the general run — gentlemen with archaeological 

 or controversial tendencies, who never pass a dingy 

 cover without going as far as the title-page — visitors, 

 perhaps, at houses in the neighbourhood wandering 

 round to look at an ancient gateway or sun-dial left 

 from monastic days. Villagers beginning to read do 

 not care for this class of work ; like children, they 

 look for something more amusing, and want some- 

 thing to wonder at for their money. 



At the post-office there is often an assortment of 

 cheap stationery on sale, for where one cottager wrote 

 a letter a few years ago ten write them now. But 

 the shopkeeper — most likely a grocer or storekeeper 

 of some kind — knows nothing of books, and will tell 

 you, if you ask him, that he never sells any or has any 

 orders. How should he sell any, pray, when he does 

 not put the right sort into his window ? He does not 

 think people read: he is occupied with moist sugar. 



