noon
There is a distinguishing air , I but meant to say , about the little shop . Looking closer , one generally finds that it comes of a choice bit of old binding , or the quaint title-page of some tuneful Elizabethan . It was an old Crashaw that first drew me inside ; and , though for some reason I did not buy it then , I bought it a year after , because to it I owed the friendship of Samuel Dale . And thus for three bright years that little shop came to be , for a daily hour or so , a blessed palm-tree away from the burden and heat of the noon , a holy place whither the money-changers and such as sold doves might never come , let their clamour in the outer courts ring never so loud . There in Samuel 's talk did two weary-hearted bond-servants of Egypt draw a breath of the Infinite into their lives of the desk ; there could they sit awhile by the eternal springs , and feel the beating of the central heart . So it happened one afternoon , about five years ago , that I dropped in there according to wont . But Samuel was engaged with some one in that dim corner at the far end of the shop , where his desk and arm-chair , tripod of that new philosophy , stood : so I turned to a neighbouring shelf to fill the time .