Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/98

72 THE BOOKSELLERS OF OLDEN TIMES. had heard were to be gained there by dogged hard work and endurance. They arrived with the typical half-crown in their pockets, and then Lackington, anxious to obtain the small legacy of 10 he had left at home, went for it personally ; " it being such a prodigious sum that the greatest caution was used on both sides, so that it cost me about half the money in going down for it, and in returning to town again." After working some time as a journeyman bookseller he opened a little cobbler's shop ; and, thinking he knew as much about books as the keeper of an old bookstall in the neighbourhood, wishing also to have opportunity for study, he invested a guinea in a bag- ful of old books. To increase his stock he borrowed 5 from a fund " Mr. Wesley's people kept to lend out, for three months, without interest, to such of their society whose characters were good, and who wanted a temporary relief. ... In our new situation we lived in a very frugal manner, often dining on potatoes and quenching our thirst with water ; being absolutely determined, if possible, to make some pro- vision for such dismal times as sickness, shortness of work, &c., which we had frequently been involved in before, and could scarcely help expecting not to be our fate again." He soon found customers, and " as ' soon laid out the money ' in other old trash which was daily brought for sale." In a short time he had realized 2$, and was able to take a book-shop in Chiswell Street ; and here he almost immediately lost his wife, which for a time in- volved him in the deepest distress, but in the following year he married again, and then resolved to quit his Wesleyan friends, a sect he thought incompatible with the dignity of a bookseller ; indeed "Mr. Wesley often