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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE CHEVALIER DE RESSEGUIER. I AM unable to explain the impulse that prompted me to purchase it. I had no use for a skull—excepting, of course, the Odb I am temporarily occupying. There have been moments, indeed, when even that has seemed to me an encumbrance. Nevertheless, I bought another. It was one of three specimens which decorated the window of a queer bookshop that I was in the habit of passing in my daily walks between the railway station and the office of the Esthetic Review. I was then living out of town. I call it a queer bookshop, for it was just that. It dealt in none but works on phrenology, toxicology, evolution, mesmerism, spiritualism, and kindred occult sciences. Against the door-jambs, and on some shelves outside, were piled small packages of quaintly bound volumes, each set tied up with apiece of frayed twine, and bearing a tag on which was written the title of the work. These thin, dingy octavos and twelvemos, looking as if they might have come out of some mediaeval library, were chiefly treatises of a psychical and social nature, and were no doubt daringly speculative. The patrons of the establishment shared its eccentricity. Now and then I caught sight of a customer either entering or leaving the shop; sometimes it was a half-shabby middle-aged man, who seemed a cross between a low comedian and a village undertaker; sometimes it was a German or a Pole, cadaverous, heavy-bearded, with a restlessness about the eyes—a fellow that might be suspected of carrying dynamite pellets in his waistcoat pocket; and sometimes it was an elderly female, severe of aspect, with short hair in dry autumnal curls, evidently a person with advanced views on Man, and so flat in figure, so wholly denuded of graceful feminine curves, as to make it difficult for one to determine...
