nerary papyrus, with curious pen-and-ink vignettes of gods
and genii surmounting the closely written columns of hieroglyphic
text.

For, you see, I have no wall space in my library upon which to hang
pictures; and yet, I am not happy, and my thoughts are not rightly in
tune, unless I have a picture or two in sight, somewhere about the
room. In the corners, hidden away behind pedestals and curtains, a
quick eye may detect stacks of pictures, ready to be brought out and
put on the easel when needed. On the pedestals stand plaster casts of
busts from antique originals in the Louvre, the Uffizzi Gallery, and
the British Museum; and yonder, beside the arched entrance between the
ante-room and the library, stands a small white marble torso of a
semi-recumbent river god which I picked up years ago from amid the
dusty stores of a little curiosity-shop in one of the small by-streets
near Soho Square. It is a splendid fragment, so powerfully and
learnedly modelled, that no less a critic than the late Charles Blanc
once suggested to me that it might be a trial-sketch by a pupil of
Michael Angelo, or even by the master himself. Curiously enough, this
little masterpiece, which has lost both arms from below the shoulders
and both legs from above the knee, was wrecked before its completion;
the face, the beard, the hair and the back being little more than
blocked out, whereas, the forepart of the trunk is highly finished. On
the opposite side of the archway, in an iron tripod, stands a large
terra-cotta amphora found in the cellar of a Roman villa discovered in
1872, close behind the Baths of Caracalla.

As I happened to be spending that winter in Rome, I went, of course,
to see the new "scavo," and there were the big jars standing in the
cellar, just as in the lifetime of the ancient owner. I need scarcely
say that I bought mine on the spot.

It is such associations as these which are the collector's greatest
pleasures. Each object recalls the place and circumstances of its
purchase, brings back incidents of foreign travel, and opens up long
vistas of delightful memories. For me, every bit of old pottery on the
tops of the bookcases has its history. That Majolica jar painted with
the Medici arms, and those Montelupo plates, were bought in Florence;
those brass salvers with heads of Doges in repousse work were picked
up in a dark old shop on one of the side canals of Venice. The tall
jars, yellow, green, white, and brown, with grot