TOM FOLIO
IN my early Boston days a gentle soul was often to be met with about town, furtively haunting old book-shops and dusty editorial rooms, a man of ingratiating simplicity of man-ner, who always spoke in a low, hesitating voice, with a note of refinement in it. He was a de-vout worshiper of Elia, and wrote pleasant dis-cursive essays smacking somewhat of his master's flavor--suggesting rather than imitating it--which he signed "Tom Folio." I forget how he glided into my acquaintanceship; doubtless in some way too shy and elusive for remembrance.
I never knew him intimately, perhaps no one did, but the intercourse between us was most cordial, and our chance meetings and bookish chats extended over a space of a dozen years.
Tom Folio--I cling to the winning pseu-donym--was sparely built and under medium height, or maybe a slight droop of the shoulders made it seem so, with a fragile look about him and an aspect of youth that was not his. En-countering him casually on a street corner, you would, at the first glance, have taken him for a youngish man, but the second glance left you doubtful. It was a figure that struck a note of singularity and would have attracted your atten-tion even in a crowd.
During the first four or five years of our ac-quaintance, meeting him only out of doors or in shops, I had never happened to see him with his hat off. One day he recklessly removed it, and in the twinkling of an eye he became an elderly bald-headed man. The Tom Folio I once knew had virtually vanished. An instant earlier he was a familiar shape; an instant later, an almost unrecognizable individual. A narrow fringe of light-colored hair, extending from ear to ear under the rear brim of his hat, had perpetrated an unintentional deception by leading one to sup-pose a head profusely covered with curly locks.
"Tom Folio," I said, "put on your hat and come back! But after that day he never seemed young to me.
I had few or no inklings of his life discon-nected with the streets and the book-stalls, chiefly those on Cornhill or in the vicinity. It is possi-ble I am wrong in inferring that he occupied a room somewhere at the South End or in South Boston, and lived entirely alone, heating his cof-fee and boiling his egg over an alcohol lamp. I
got from him one or two fortuitous hints of quaint housekeeping. Every winter, it appeared, some relative, far or near, sent him a large batch of mince pies, twenty or thirty at least. He once spoke to me of having laid in his winter pie, just as another might speak of laying in his winter coal. The only fireside companion Tom Folio ever alluded to in my presence was a Maltese cat, whose poor health seriously disturbed him from time to time. I suspected those mince pies. The cat, I recollect, was named Miss Mowcher.
If he had any immediate family ties beyond this I was unaware of them, and not curious to be enlightened on the subject. He was more pic-turesque solitary. I preferred him to remain so.
Other figures introduced into the background of the canvas would have spoiled the artistic effect.
Tom Folio was a cheerful, lonely man--a recluse even when he allowed himself to be jostled and hurried along on the turbulent stream of humanity sweeping in opposite directions through Washington Street and its busy estu-aries. He was in the crowd, but not of it. I
had so little real knowledge of him that I was obliged to imagine his more intimate environ-ments. However wide of the mark my conjec-tures may have fallen, they were as satisfying to me as facts would have been. His secluded room I could picture to myself with a sense of certainty--the couch (a sofa by day), the cup-board, the writing-table with its student lamp, the litter of pamphlets and old quartos and oc-tavos in tattered bindings, among which were scarce reprints of his beloved Charles Lamb, and perhaps--nay, surely--an editio prin-ceps of the "Essays."
The gentle Elia never had a gentler follower or a more loving disciple than Tom Folio. He moved and had much of his being in the early part of the last century. To him the South-Sea House was the most important edifice on the globe, remaining the same venerable pile it used to be, in spite of all the changes that had be-fallen it. It was there Charles Lamb passed the novitiate of his long years of clerkship in the East India Company. In Tom Folio's fancy a slender, boyish figure was still seated, quill in hand, behind those stately porticoes looking upon Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. That famous first paper in the "Essays," describing the South-Sea House and the group of human oddities which occupied desks within its gloomy chambers, had left an indelible impression upon the dreamer. Every line traced by the "lean annuitant" was as familiar to Tom Folio as if he had written it himself. Stray scraps, which had escaped the vigilance of able editors, were known to him, and it was his to unearth amid a heap of mouldy, worm-eaten magazines, a handful of leaves hitherto forgotten of all men.
Trifles, yes--but Charles Lamb's! "The king's chaff is as good as other people's corn,"
says Tom Folio.
