and small respect for our
literature. I am sure this was not wholly true, for on this occasion he
told me he had read "Huckleberry Finn," and doted on "Uncle Remus." He
also spoke with affection and feeling of Walt Whitman, and told me that he
had read every printed word that Emerson had written. And further he
congratulated me on the success of my book, "Songs From Vagabondia."

* * * * *

The housekeeping world seems to have been in thrall to six haircloth
chairs, a slippery sofa to match, and a very cold, marble-top center
table, from the beginning of this century down to comparatively recent
times. In all the best homes there was also a marble mantel to match the
center table; on one end of this mantel was a blue glass vase containing a
bouquet of paper roses, and on the other a plaster-of-Paris cat. Above the
mantel hung a wreath of wax flowers in a glass case. In such houses were
usually to be seen gaudy-colored carpets, imitation lace curtains, and a
what-not in the corner that seemed ready to go into dissolution through
the law of gravitation.

Early in the Seventies lithograph-presses began to make chromos that were
warranted just as good as oil-paintings, and these were distributed in
millions by enterprising newspapers as premiums for subscriptions. Looking
over an old file of the "Christian Union" for the year Eighteen Hundred
Seventy-one, I chanced upon an editorial wherein it was stated that the
end of painting pictures by hand had come, and the writer piously thanked
heaven for it--and added, "Art is now within the reach of all." Furniture,
carpets, curtains, pictures and books were being manufactured by
machinery, and to glue things together and give them a look of gentility
and get them into a house before they fell apart, was the seeming
desideratum of all manufacturers.

The editor of the "Christian Union" surely had a basis of truth for his
statement; art had received a sudden chill: palettes and brushes could be
bought for half-price, and many artists were making five-year contracts
with lithographers; while those too old to learn to draw on
lithograph-stones saw nothing left for them but to work designs with
worsted in perforated cardboard.

To the influence of William Morris does the civilized world owe its
salvation from the mad rage and rush for the tawdry and cheap in home
decoration. It will not do to say that if William Morris had not called a
halt some one