wearisome minuteness of this description is owing to his being, at least in my estimation, the most interesting character within the scope of these scrappy memoirs.
I looked round for the book-shelf. It was a book-case this time; a flat packing-case, nailed to the wall, fitted with shelves, and curtained on the front. I rose and inspected the collection: fifty or sixty volumes altogether—poetry, drama, popular theology, reference, and a few miscellaneous works; history meagrely represented, science and yellow-back fiction not at all.
"You don't find many people of my name in the country?" remarked the boundary man trivially, after a pause.
"Not many," I replied, wondering whether he referred to his nickname or to the inexpensive, but lasting, gift of his godfathers and godmothers, at the time of their annoying mistake.
"I suppose you hardly know one," he persisted.
"Not that I can think of," I replied. "Have you any swapping-books?"
"Yes, you'll find 'Elsie Venne' lying on top of the upper shelf."
"I've read it years ago, but we'll change," I replied. "When I first got my swapping-book, it was by Hannah More; now it's by Zola, and smutty enough at that; it has undergone about twenty intermediate metamorphoses, and it's still going remarkably strong—in both senses of the word. Therefore I can recommend it."
"I don't think it does a person any good to read Zola," remarked the boundary man gravely.
"Not the slightest, Alf—that is, in the works by which he is represented amongst us. But do you think it does a person any good to read Holmes? Zola has several phases; one of them, I admit, blue as heaven's own tinct; but Holmes has only one phase, namely, pharisaism. Zola, even as we know him here in Riverina, has this advantage, that he gives you no rest for the sole of your foot—or rather, for the foot of your soul; whilst Holmes serenely seduces you to his own pinchbeck standard. Zola is honest; he never calls evil, good; whilst Holmes is spurious all through. Mind you, each has a genuine literary merit of his own.
"But don't you like Holmes's poetry?" asked Alf.
"Well, his poems fill a little volume that the world would be sorry to lose; but why did n't he write one verse—just one—for the Abolitionists to quote?"
"Because it's not in his nature to denounce things," objected Alf.
"Neither was it in Longfellow's nature; yet Longfellow's poems on Slavery are judged worthy to form a separate section of his works. But Holmes can denounce most valiantly. He denounces witch-burning and Inquisition-persecution, like the chivalrous soul that he is. He has achieved the distinction of being the only American poet of note who blandly ignores Slavery, and takes part with the aristocrat, as against the lowly. The same spirit runs through all his writings. He has a range of about three notes: a flunkeyish koo-tooing to soap-bubble eminence; a tawdry sympathy with aristocratic woe; and a drivelling contempt for
