A BACK-BLOCK LIBRARY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3755, 2 March 1926, Page 9

A BACK-BLOCK LIBRARY.

By “Quartus” When St. Paul, as prisoner at Rome, wrote asking Timothy to bring with him to Rome "the books, but especially the parchments. 1 or rolls, which, with his cloak, the aged apostle had at some earlier day left behind him with Carpus at Iroas ; he »vaa appending a kind of p.s. to his epistle, which, though perhaps of no very striking nature, yet gives us incidentally an interesting sidelight on his character, and also on his prison conditions and experience. "We can do without boots,” said a sage, “but we cannot do without cooks.” Paul evidently held an opinion opposice to that of the adage. So also < William Tvndale. f he martyr, when from his dark cell at Vilvorde. he wrote a letter to his friend begging “for Jesus'* -\nke for a warmer cap. something to p..tc] his le 'rings, a woollen shirt, and, above all, his Hebrew Bible, grammar, and dictionary.” Of course it is the Duke, is it not, in “As You Like It,” who bids us find “sermons in stones, Books in the running brooks, and good in everything?” and Wordsworth cries “Up! Up! And quit thy books”—following with that sweet didactic quatrain, which only Wordsworth could ! ave written: One impulse from a vernal wood Wil. teach you more of man, Of human nature and of good, Than all the cages can. But I am on the side of Paul and Tyndale, rather than with Ganzalo and and the Lake Poet in this matter! “Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life” —the Devils dictum, indeed, but true for all that, if the reference be taken to be the calf skin, or buckskin binding of some precious particular volume with which a man would part last thing before his life. Was it Lord Avebury who loved to make lists of “The Hundred Best Books?” But what a glutton was he! What an epicure! What a Sybaritic bibliophile, with his “helluo librorum!” I am thinking rather of the poor wretch that is marooned on a desert island, or of some benighted back-of-beyond back-block brother, whose choice of books is limited to three! “Hundred Best Books” forsooth! Shanghaied on some islet of the coral seas, or with scarcely a pound in the purse to pay for them! “Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed,” and the development of a library, under similar conditions, may.be as distressingly slow! But you say, glibly enough, “The Shapespeare, and some work astronomical, as Brinkley or Ball, or gastronomical, as Mrs Beeton—there's a library that <jven a raarooner, or a back-blocker, may possess and, possessing, bo rich indeed!” Well, at least you have begun to sense the situatiott! The Bible, Bobbie Burns, and Blackie’s Dictionary—there, surely, you have your back-block library, readymade, within you. purse, beyond all fear of exhaustion, and may H( en ’ess to your soul, my back-block brother, every session of sweet, silent thought! I kept tryst this morning, never mind whether wfcJii prophet, poet, or logologistseer, prophet, or lexicographer (there is ever a pleasing variety, at least, about the pages of the last-named!); a-stretcb among the tussocks now a-belly, now a back, nrotected from a fitful breeze by the strong munitions of the rocks, startled at times by the sudden rush of a rabbit, distracted agaia by the breathless carolling of a mounting lark (ah! surely, Shelley was in the right of it—“bird thou

never wert —but unembodied jov!") and anon, rendered drowsy by the lowing of contented kine, and the occasional staccato bleat of browsiog sheep. Then came to me as I clo • d my book—Bible or Burns or Ball, which ever it was—the thought with which this article is introduced about Paul in prison calling for his parchments and the pathetic appeal of exiled Tyndale for his Hebrew Bible, and grammar, and dictionary, and then 1 knew—for had not I, too, felt the truth of it along with them —that for solitude, and the lonely places, God’s best blessing to men is a good book, some valued volume. No wonder Charles Lamb felt like saying grace as often as he began to read! “Grace before meat”—as you open your book, why not? I think we would grow fatter that way by our reading—strongerminded I mean, after a mental meal that God has blessed! It is not altogether, perhaps, so much the truth my book contains, or the teaching it imparts, but somehow man still needs the word, that the word in him may be made flesh, and this morning, through the medium of my book, lonely, unattended, unbefriended, I somehow passed at a step, at a breath, at a turning of the page, into that pleasant and populous spiritual company that ever waits the coming of every truly lonely, book-guided soul! The parchments cam- to be Paul’s passports to Paradise; his Hebrew Bible was but advance courier of untamed Tyndale’s spirit to celestial fellowship; and the book of Job —there, you have the name of my trysted friend, after all—conducted tne, I know not how, into that blissful realm of truth, where rabbits and larks become as brothers and sisters (though l could never with Francis preach sermons to the birds, or with Bernard to the fishes! — like Luther, I rather let them preach to me), and cows and sheep become as familiar friends, and the breeze blew on me as the very breath of heaven, and the open face of the sky, ablaze with morning sunlight, was unto me as the smiling countenance of God. Then came to me across the ridge an echoing “Coo-ec,” a tocsin of the soul—a voice like that that breathed o'er Eden, or as oue that crietli in the wilderness. “Coo-eet Coo-ee!” which, being interpreted. at that matutinal hour—that hour when, most jf all. Nature abhors a vacuum—meant “Breakfast’s ready! Come to breakfast!” So. rising from my reverie, home o breakfast J went, reflecting what deep truth lies hid after all in that saying of the sages, that garnered wisdom of the ages, “We can do without books but we annot do without cooks!” Yes, my back-block brethren, there you have your back-block library—the Bible, Shakespeare, or Burns, Ball or Beeton, your ever-blessed Three-in-One, One-in-Three. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, digest them as you do your back-block breakfast, and may heaven so bless your laily food—both of books and cooks —unto j r ou, as to make you more and more „*hat we all believe you to be, the very bulwark of our below land!