" What share in the production and maintenance of that amiable and
enviable condition of disposition may be attributed to the ever-present
influence of the Pocket Psalm-Book cannot be known; but the constant
study of the holy though clumsy verses may have largely caused that sweet
agreeability which so characterized John Symmons.
There lies now before me a copy of one of the early editions of "The Bay
Psalm-Book." As I open the little dingy octavo volume, with its worn
and torn edges, I am conscious of that distinctive, penetrating,
_old-booky_ smell,--that ancient, that fairly _obsolete_ odor that
never is exhaled save from some old, infrequently opened, leather-bound
volume, which has once in years far past been much used and handled. A book
which has never been familiarly used and loved cannot have quite the same
antique perfume. The mouldering, rusty, flaky leather comes off in a
yellow-brown powder on my fingers as I take up the book; and the cover
nearly breaks off as I open it, though with tender, book-loving usage. The
leather, though strong and honest, has rotted or disintegrated until it has
almost fallen into dust. Across the yellow, ill-printed pages there runs,
zig-zagging sideways and backwards crab-fashion on his crooked brown legs,
one of those pigmy book-spiders,--those ugly little bibliophiles that seem
flatter even than the close-pressed pages that form their home.
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