Francis Hopkinson Smith

“ Nor did I think it best, as the Great Head had suggested, to thrust myself and my curiosity upon Miss Dickens, the lives of distinguished descendants of distinguished people being too often made miserable by the Paul Prys of this earth. What mattered it, anyway, when the grime and soot and stain of the years are still to be seen both on the rounded nose of the old building in which her grandfather had corrected his proofs and on the measly row of houses on which Dickens looked and in one of which she herself—God bless her!—is to-day earning her living. ”

“ The desks, tables, and chairs made in the year one, the mahogany kept bright by a line of editors, proof-readers, and critics going back to the Palæozoic Age; a place where the insides of unbound books are carted around on low trucks; where clerks, some in their shirt-sleeves, pore over big ledgers, successors of other ledgers, dating from mediæval times, and sit on high stools facing high desks. ”

“ A place where plate glass, gold lettering, Persian rugs, page boys in buttons, silver-plated ice-pitchers, and stuffed morocco chairs are unknown; where the very atmosphere reeks with musty traditions, and where at night myriads of ghosts, whose names and deeds are world-famous, stalk through the dusty lofts or hobnob with the shades of the presses that gave them life. ”