imal painting as I have ever seen. In the north
room, with its tables and mantelpiece and desks and chests made of woods
sent from the Philippines by army friends, or by other friends for other
reasons; with its bison and wapiti heads; there are three paintings by
Marcus Symonds--"Where Light and Shadow Meet," "The Porcelain Towers,"
and "The Seats of the Mighty"; he is dead now, and he had scant
recognition while he lived, yet surely he was a great imaginative
artist, a wonderful colorist, and a man with a vision more wonderful
still. There is one of Lungren's pictures of the Western plains; and a
picture of the Grand Canyon; and one by a Scandinavian artist who could
see the fierce picturesqueness of workaday Pittsburgh; and sketches of
the White House by Sargent and by Hopkinson Smith.

The books are everywhere. There are as many in the north room and in the
parlor--is drawing-room a more appropriate name than parlor?--as in the
library; the gun-room at the top of the house, which incidentally has
the loveliest view of all, contains more books than any of the other
rooms; and they are particularly delightful books to browse among, just
because they have not much relevance to one another, this being one of
the reasons why they are relegated to their present abode. But the books
have overflowed into all the other rooms too.

I could not name any principle upon which the books have been gathered.
Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in
laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person,
and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover's
besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls "the mad pride of
intellectuality," taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does
not like the same kind of books. Of course there are books which a man
or woman uses as instruments of a profession--law books, medical books,
cookery books, and the like. I am not speaking of these, for they are
not properly "books" at all; they come in the category of time-tables,
telephone directories, and other useful agencies of civilized life. I
am speaking of books that are meant to be read. Personally, granted that
these books are decent and healthy, the one test to which I demand
that they all submit is that of being interesting. If the book is not
interesting to the reader, then in all but an infinitesimal number of
cases it gives scant benefit to the reader. Of course any