I was a book-agent for one summer, but am trying to live it down.  Hoping to sell a copy of the book whose glowing description I had memorized, I called at the home of a wealthy farmer.  The house was spacious and embowered in beautiful trees and shrubbery.  There was a noble driveway that led up from the country road, and everything betokened great prosperity.  Once inside the house, I took a survey of the fittings and could see at once that the farmer had lavished money upon the home to make it distinctive in the neighborhood as a suitable background for his wife and daughters.  The piano alone must have cost a small fortune, and it was but one of the many instruments to be seen.  There were carpets, rugs, and curtains in great profusion, and a bewildering array of all sorts of bric-a-brac.  In time the father asked one of the daughters to play, and she responded with rather unbecoming alacrity.  What she played I shall never know, but it seemed to me to be a five-finger exercise.  Whatever it was, it was not music.  I lost interest at once and so had time to make a more critical inspection of the decorations.  What I saw was a battle royal.  There was the utmost lack of harmony.  The rugs fought the carpets, and both were at the throats of the curtains.  Then the wall-paper joined in the fray, and the din and confusion was torture to the spirit.  Even the furniture caught the spirit of discord and made fierce attacks upon everything else in the room.  The reds, and yellows, and blues, and greens whirled and swirled about in such a dizzy and belligerent fashion that I wondered how the people ever managed to escape nervous prostration.  But the daughter went right on with the five-finger exercise as if nothing else were happening.  I shall certainly cite this case when the man comes in to explain what he means by complete living.

This all reminds me of the man of wealth who thought it incumbent upon him to give his neighbors some benefit of his money in the way of pleasure.  So he went to Europe and bought a great quantity of marble statuary and had the pieces placed in the spacious grounds about his home.  When the opening day came there ensued much suppressed tittering and, now and then, an uncontrollable guffaw.  Diana, Venus, Vulcan, Apollo, Jove, and Mercury had evidently stumbled into a convention of nymphs, satyrs, fairies, sprites, furies, harpies, gargoyles, giants, pygmies, muses, and fates.  The result was bedlam.  Parenthetically, I have often wondered how much money it cost that man to make the discovery that he was not a connoisseur of art, and also what process of education might have fitted him for a wise expenditure of all that money.