Note 87 — Chapter LXIII
Reading edition
This practice is not so uncommon. Dr. Johnson had a very similar habit in his “sort of magical movement” (Life by Boswell, end of year 1764); and a member of my own college at Oxford, nearly thirty years ago, touched just like the man in Lavengro. Once in the Schools he remembered he had passed by a pebble which he had noticed in the High Street: he tore up his papers, and went and picked up the pebble.