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To give to this leather the elegant finish known as "tree-calf binding", it is first washed with glaire or albumen. The boards of the book are then bent to a convex shape, and water sprinkled over, until it runs down from the centre in many little branches or rivulets.

Brackett's estimation, an odd volume of an encyclopedia, bound in tree-calf and labeled, "Safety-lamps to Stranglers." Next were four fat tomes in the German language on scientific subjects; these, provided that anybody had ever wanted to read them, had never succeeded in getting themselves read, but they had cuts and cuts which were fascinating to surmise about.

Among other volumes of verse on the top shelf of the bookcase, of which I used to look at the outside without penetrating deeply within, were Pope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dryden's Virgil, pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James Crissy in Philadelphia, and illustrated with small copper-plates, which somehow seemed to put the matter hopelessly beyond me.

"No, King, a paper engraving cannot be restored. What is that number pasted on it for?" "We numbered all the things, so as to make it like a real auction," said Marjorie. Mr. Maynard glanced round the room. "You rascally children!" he cried; "if you haven't stuck papers on all the vases and bric-a-brac in the room! And on this tree-calf Tennyson, as I live! Oh, my little Maynards!

He could not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did not even try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil which his father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the small copper-plates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion to him.

After a while, rousing himself a little, he shifted his position and, drawing from the pocket of his shooting coat his little tree-calf edition of the Odyssey, read far into the twenty-first book, where, after the failure of all the suitors to bend Ulysses's bow, it is finally put, with mockery, into his own hands. Abruptly the drama of the story roused him from all his languor.

It was called The Two Monuments. So Thompson received a copy of the Memoirs of Eminent Etonians, bound in tree-calf, and took it home under his arm, wondering what "Etonians" were, but too proud to ask. "Parvenu!"

There were rugs on the marble pavement, and chairs and tables; and on the tables, besides vases with flowers, and other things, there were a good many books. It was an old, small book, in tree-calf, stamped, in the midst of much elaborate gold tooling, with the Valdeschi arms and coronet. Half-consciously examining it, he became aware presently that it was a volume of the poems of Ronsard.

Perhaps it might run like this: "I, A. B., do hereby promise that I will never buy a classical book in any tongue, or any book in a rare edition; that I will never spend money on books in tree-calf or tooled morocco; that I shall never enter a real old bookshop, but should it be necessary shall purchase my books at a dry goods store, and there shall never buy anything but the cheapest religious literature, or occasionally a popular story for my wife, and to this promise I solemnly set my hand."

Among other volumes of verse on the top shelf of the bookcase, of which I used to look at the outside without penetrating deeply within, were Pope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dryden's Virgil, pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James Crissy in Philadelphia, and illustrated with small copper-plates, which somehow seemed to put the matter hopelessly beyond me.