penetrate. For my own part, I have only one test of a good library, which I always employ when I get anywhere near a card catalogue. There is a certain work, in three volumes, famous chiefly because Robert Louis Stevenson took the second volume with him on his immortal Travels With a Donkey. It is called Pastors of the Desert, by Peyrat, a history of the Huguenots. If you will turn again to R. L. S.'s chapter called A Camp in the Dark you will see that he says:
I had felt no other inconvenience, except when my feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of Peyrat's Pastors of the Desert among the mixed contents of my sleeping bag.
I am happy to assert that the Mercantile has a set of these volumes, and therefore one may pronounce it an A-l library.
Of course the Mercantile has many more orthodox treasures than Peyrat, though its function is not to collect incunabula or rare editions, but to keep its members supplied with the standard things, and the important books and periodicals of the day. Mr. Hedley was gracious enough to take me into the locked section of the gallery, where there are alcoves teeming with old volumes and rich in the dust that is so delightful to the lover of these things. He showed me, for instance, a first edition of the Authorized or King James Bible, imprinted at London by Robert Barker in 1611. Inside the front cover some one has written in pencil
