ill never be
finished. Will you look at the books?"

Nothing is more pathetic, to my mind, than to take up the books of one
who is dead. Here is his name, with perhaps a note of the place where
the volume was bought or read, and the marks on the pages that he liked
best. Here are the passages that gave him pleasure, and the thoughts
that entered into his life and formed it; they became part of him, but
where has he carried them now?

Falconer's little library was an unstudied choice, and gave a hint
of his character. There was a New Testament in French, with his name
written in a slender, woman's hand; three or four volumes of stories,
Cable's "Old Creole Days," Allen's "Kentucky Cardinal," Page's "In
Old Virginia," and the like; "Henry Esmond" and Amiel's "Journal" and
Lamartine's "Raphael"; and a few volumes of poetry, among them one of
Sidney Lanier's, and one of Tennyson's earlier poems.

There was also a little morocco-bound book of manuscript notes. This I
begged permission to carry away with me, hoping to find in it something
which would throw light upon my picture, perhaps even some message to
be carried, some hint or suggestion of something which the writer would
fain have had done for him, and which I promised myself faithfully
to perform, as a test of an imagined friendship--imagined not in the
future, but in the impossible past.

I read the book in this spirit, searching its pages carefully, through
the long afternoon, in the solitary cabin of my boat. There was nothing
at first but an ordinary diary; a record of the work and self-denials of
a poor student of art. Then came the date of his first visit to Larmone,
and an expression of the pleasure of being with his own people again
after a lonely life, and some chronicle of his occupations there,
studies for pictures, and idle days that were summed up in a phrase: "On
the bay," or "In the woods."

After this the regular succession of dates was broken, and there
followed a few scraps of verse, irregular and unfinished, bound together
by the thread of a name--"Claire among her Roses," "A Ride through
the Pines with Claire," "An Old Song of Claire's" "The Blue Flower in
Claire's Eyes." It was not poetry, but such an unconscious tribute to
the power and beauty of poetry as unfolds itself almost inevitably from
youthful love, as naturally as the blossoms unfold from the apple trees
in May. If you pick them they are worthless. They charm only in their
own tim