From There’s Pippins And Cheese To Come, by Charles S. Brooks (Yale University Press, 1917)
By some slim chance, reader, you may be the kind of person who, on a visit to a strange city, makes for a bookshop.
…
But the habit of reading at the open stalls was not only with the poor. You will remember that Mr. Brownlow was addicted. Really, had not the Artful Dodger stolen his pocket handkerchief as he was thus engaged upon his book, the whole history of Oliver Twist must have been quite different. And Pepys himself, Samuel Pepys, F.R.S., was guilty. “To Paul’s Church Yard,” he writes, “and there looked upon the second part of Hudibras, which I buy not, but borrow to read.” Such parsimony is the curse of authors. To thumb a volume cheaply around a neighborhood is what keeps them in their garrets. It is a less offence to steal peanuts from a stand.
So our dear Mr. Brownlow, respectable gentleman and thief.
‘The prosecutor was reading, was he?’ inquired Fang, after another pause.
‘Yes,’ replied the man. ‘The very book he has in his hand.’
‘Oh, that book, eh?’ said Fang. ‘Is it paid for?’
‘No, it is not,’ replied the man, with a smile.
‘Dear me, I forgot all about it!’ exclaimed the absent old gentleman, innocently.
‘A nice person to prefer a charge against a poor boy!’ said Fang, with a comical effort to look humane. ‘I consider, sir, that you have obtained possession of that book, under very suspicious and disreputable circumstances; and you may think yourself very fortunate that the owner of the property declines to prosecute. Let this be a lesson to you, my man, or the law will overtake you yet. The boy is discharged. Clear the office!’
, on a topic of which I know little other than the abbreviated, over-simplified summary found in my high school textbook. The chapter on Schlieffen’s Plan brings to mind a question.
