Huntin', Shootin'

I met an intellectual stranger on the top of a country bits, and we talked about books. Presently he said: "You see that house?" (a Palladian mansion in its own park)—"how many books would you say they had in It?"

I supposed that they had at least the usual library of decaying calf-bound volumes, and hazarded a guess of three or four thousand.

"Not a bit of it; that was sold by the hundredweight twenty years ago. There are exactly twenty-seven books, including the timetable and telephone directory, and the butler has sixteen of them."

"How do you know." I said.

"Oh, I'm the butler."