Excerpt from The Unstrung Bow: A Story of Conquest My late friend, Ruthven C. Smith, was called a queer fellow, yet he had his good qualities and his warm friends. For many years his old book shop was a literary landmark in Boston; and when his vulgar, money-loving landlord forced him to close its doors, a sigh of regret went up from the score of bibliomaniacs who frequented the place. Nor did our regrets spring from reasons wholly selfish, for it was not within the knowledge of his closest friends that any of us had ever obtained from Smith a single one of his known treasures. It was for other and more subtle reasons we sighed. The old store had a history running back to colonial times. The Corner book-shop had seen the first awakenings of American literary life, and had become a fixture in the lives of many people - in fact in the life of the city itself - and it was a distinct shock to find its doors closed to its friends for the first time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.