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tling," he went on. "A Folger E. Bidwell, in the shipping line, and they consolidated certain of his effects. Now here's books!" he said with pride as the boy wheeled up with a cartful of wreckage. "Here's volumes as will set well in a trunk — record of incoming and outgoing vessels, together with tonnage, since 1832 — twelve volumes in a nice mock-leather binding and hardly a hole punched out. Knock the offering down at two pound ten."
"There seems to be some misapprehension," said Fields. "I want the best books you've got, the finest authors in English literature."
After some skirmishing about the price, Fields filled the trunk and repaired to his hotel room. For months following he dug into the volumes, reading, studying, memorizing. Many of them he had met before, when he began his self-imposed education in America, but now he broadened his scope, digesting and enjoying writers whose output, earlier, had seemed prohibitively erudite. Among the authors represented in his new collection were Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, Bacon, and Chaucer; and Virgil, Homer, Milton and De Maupassant in translation. At the same time he acquired additional works of Dickens that, to date, he had overlooked. From the moment of their first acquaintance, Fields had felt an especial affinity for Dickens, in some of whose characters he saw strong traces of himself. Another thing militating in Dickens' behalf, for Fields, was the frequent appearance, on the same bill as himself, of a performer named Owen McGiveney, a popular vaudeville artist of the time, who specialized in Dickens impersonations. McGiveney had a real feeling for Dickens, and Fields always went out front to watch him after his own act was finished.
"Gentlemen," Mr. McGiveney, as Micawber, would cry from the stage, "you are friends in need and friends indeed. Allow me to offer my inquiries with reference to the physical welfare of Mrs.
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