His
eyes moved from the jutting sign-board at the corner, announcing
_Gentlemen's Libraries Purchased_, to the legend that ran above the
window, blazoned in letters of gold:
_Isaac Rickman: New & Second-Hand Bookseller._
His connexion with it was by no means casual and temporary. It was his
father's shop.
CHAPTER V
The little booksellers of the Strand, in their death struggle against
Rickman's, never cursed that house more heartily than did the Junior
Journalists, in their friendly, shabby little den, smelling of old
leather and tobacco and the town. They complained that it cut on
two-thirds of the light from the front windows of the reading-room.
Not that any of them were ever known to read in it. They used it
chiefly as a place to talk in, for which purpose little illumination
was required.
To-night one of the windows in question was occupied by a small group
of talkers isolated from the rest. There was Mackinnon, of _The
Literary Observer_. There were the three wild young spirits of _The
Planet_, Stables, who had launched it with frightful impetus into
space (having borrowed a sum sufficient for the purpose), Maddox, who
controlled its course, and Rankin, whose brilliance made it twinkle so
brightly in the firmament. With them, but emphatically not of them,
was Horace Jewdwine, of Lazarus, who had come up from Oxford to join
the staff of _The Museion_.
Jewdwine and Mackinnon, both secure of a position and a salary, looked
solemn and a little anxious; but the men of _The Planet_, having
formed themselves into a sort of unlimited liability company, and
started a brand new "weekly" of their own (upon no sort of security
beyond their bare brains) were as persons without a single care, worry
or responsibility.
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