Puzzles of the Black Widowers - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,28

Thackeray and Trollope and puzzled over Tristram Shandy. I remember being fascinated by Warren's Ten Thousand a Year. It was a mixture of humor and incredibly reactionary politics. The antihero was Tittlebat Titmouse and there was a very effective villain named Oily Gammon. I eventually learned, from my reading, that 'gammon' was a slang term equivalent to our present slang term of 'boloney.'

"I read Pope, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Coleridge - didn't like Wordsworth or Browning, for some reason. There was lots of Shakespeare, naturally. I wasn't strong on nonfiction, but I remember trying to read Darwin's Origin of Species and not getting very far. There was a new book, Outline of History by H. G. Wells, that fascinated me. I read some American writers, too. Mark Twain and Hawthorne, but I couldn't stay with Moby Dick. I read some of Walter Scott. All this was spread out over years, to be sure."

Trumbull, at this point, stirred in his seat and said, "Mr. Manfred, I take it this Lineweaver was a wealthy man."

"Quite well-to-do, yes."

"Did he have children?"

"Two grown sons. A grown daughter."

"Grandchildren?"

"Several."

"Why did he make a surrogate son of you, then?"

Manfred considered. "I don't know. The house was empty except for servants. He was a widower. His children and grandchildren rarely came to visit. He was lonely, I suppose, and liked having a youngster in the house, now and then. I'm under the impression he thought I was bright and he certainly enjoyed my pleasure in the books. He would occasionally sit and talk to me about them, ask me what I thought of this book or that, and suggest new ones I might read."

"Did he ever give you any money?" asked Trumbull.

"Only that dollar a week, which he handed me without fail each Saturday. Eventually, I dropped the paper route, but he didn't know that. I kept on delivering his paper every day. I'd buy it myself and deliver it."

"Did he feed you?"

"The hot cocoa. When I stayed through lunch, a servant would bring me a ham sandwich and milk, or the equivalent."

"Did he give you books?"

Manfred shook his head slowly. "Not while he was alive. Never. He wouldn't give me one, or let me borrow one. I could read whatever I liked, but only as long as I sat in the library. I had to wash my hands before I walked into the library and I had to put each book back on the shelf in the place where I had got it before taking another."

Avalon said, "I should think Mr. Lineweaver's children would resent you."

"I think they did," said Manfred, "but I never saw them while the old man was alive. Once he said to me, with a little chuckle, 'One of my sons said I must keep an eye on you, or you'll take some of my books.' I must have looked horrified at the insult to my parents. Would that be the kind of son they would bring up? He laughed and tousled my hair and said, 'I told him he didn't know what he was talking about.' "

Rubin said, "Were his books valuable?"

"At the time, it never occurred to me that they might be. I had no idea what books cost, or that some might be worth more than others. I found out, eventually, though. He was proud of them, you see. He told me he had bought every one of them himself. I said that some of them looked so old he must have bought them when he was a little boy.

"He laughed, and said, 'No, I bought many of them in secondhand bookstores. They were old when I got them, you see. If you do that, sometimes you can pick up some very valuable books for almost nothing. Triple devil,' he said. 'Triple devil.'

"I thought he was referring to himself and how clever he was to find these valuable books. Of course, I didn't know which ones might be the valuable ones.

"As the years passed, I developed an ambition. What I wanted was to own a bookstore someday. I wanted to be surrounded by books and sell them till I had made enough money to build a library of my own, a collection of books I wouldn't have to sell and that I could read to my heart's content.

"I told this to Mr. Lineweaver once, when he questioned me. I said I was going to work in the tailor shop and save every cent till I had enough to buy a