The stranger halts before one of the latter. “Yes, this is it,” he says. He has a strange habit of talking aloud to himself. “I remember it well. It was here that my father, on certain market days, sold books to the clergy of the county. The good men came from every parish to see his wares and to hear him describe their contents.”
He turns abruptly around. “Yes, this is the place,” he repeats.
He stands quite still and upright, directly in front of the little old stall. He takes off his hat and holds it beneath his arm. His great walking stick has fallen into the gutter. He bows his head and clasps his hands. He does not seem to know that the rain is falling.
The clock in the tower above the market strikes eleven. The passers-by stop and gaze at the stranger. The market people peer at him from their booths and stalls. Some laugh as the rain runs in streams down his scarred old cheeks. Rain is it? Or can it be tears?
Boys hoot at him. Some of the ruder ones even hint at throwing mud; but a sense of shame withholds them from the act.
“He is a poor lunatic. Let him alone,” say the more com-passionate.
The rain falls upon his bare head and his broad shoulders. He is drenched and chilled. But he stands motionless and silent, looking neither to the right nor to the left.
“Who is that old fool?” asks a thoughtless young man who chances to be passing.
“Do you ask who he is?” answers a gentleman from London. “Why, he is Dr. Samuel Johnson, the most famous man in England. It was he who wrote Rasselas and The Lives of the Poets and Irene and many another work which all men a