The Reflections of a Lonely Man

of his eyes, ? which is somewhat unusual among lonely men, ? he fell into a bibliological reverie which lasted till his pipe had been twice refilled and had grown cold after the last filling. There were not many books on the mantel; for although the Lonely Man was a lover of books, he was not a very heavy owner of them, chiefly because he was more willing to lend a book than he was to ask for its return. Books that would certainly have been on the shelves of less critical readers were not in his collection, for he was not willing to interrupt his reflections to read a book from which he could not hope to get something commensurate with the trouble of reading it. He had observed that books which really contain facts worth knowing are, in these days of much printing, extremely likely to be mere compilations of better books, and that books which are not compilations are apt to achieve originality at the cost of veracity and exactness. He did not like to be led astray by the latter; and, as to the former, he found it more interesting to reflect on what his own experience had taught him than to read something in which one man tries to tell what another man knows. If it is as true that a fool learns in the school of experience as it is that he can learn in no other, the Lonely Man must have possessed much knowledge, for, whether he was a fool or not, he had had experience of nearly everything that a man can read about in books, and of some things that a man ...