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The old book-shop on Cripple Street in the city of Hamilton was walled to its dusky ceiling with books. Books were stacked on the floor like split wood, with alleys between. The long table down the centre was piled with old magazines and the wrecks of paper-covered novels. School arithmetics and dead theologies; Annuals in faded gilt, called "Keepsake," or "Friendship's Offering"; little leathern nubbins of books from the last century, that yet seemed less antique than the Annuals which counted no more than forty years -- so southern and early-passing was the youth of the Annual; Bohn's translations, the useful and despised; gaudy, glittering prints of the poets and novelists; all were crowded together without recognition of caste, in a common Bohemia. Finding a book in that mystical chaos seemed to establish a right to it of first discovery. The pretty girl, who sat in one of the dim windows and kept the accounts, looked Oriental but not Jewish, and wore crimson ribbons in her black hair and at her throat. She read one of the Annuals, or gazed through the window at Cripple Street. A show-case in the other window contained stamp collections, Hindoo, Chinese, and Levantine coinage.
Far back in the shop a daring explorer might come upon a third window, gray, grimy, beyond which lay the unnamable backyards between Cripple and Academy Streets. It could not be said to "open on" them, for it was never opened, or "give a view" of them, being thick with gray dust. But if one went up to it and looked carefully, there in the dim corner might be seen an old man with a long faded black coat, rabbinical beard, dusky, transparent skin, and Buddha eyes, blue, faint, far away, self-abnegating, such as under the Bo-tree might have looked forth in meek abstraction on the infinities and perceived the Eightfold Principle. It was always possible to find Mr. Barria by steering for the window. So appeared the old bookshop on Cripple Street, Mr. Barria, the dealer, and his granddaughter, Janey.