The argument, however, was not quite so serious an affair as I at first supposed, for it all ended in a laugh and easily ran off into a quiet debate as to the value of Imperial Japan versus Whatman.

We walked through the various old parlors that now do duty as workrooms for bright-eyed girls, then over through the Kelmscott Press, and from this to another old mansion that had on its door a brass plate so polished and repolished, like a machine-made sonnet too much gone over, that one can scarcely make out its intent.  Finally I managed to trace the legend, “The Seasons.”  I was told it was here that Thomson, the poet, wrote his book.  Once back in the library of Kelmscott House, Mr. Ellis and Th’ Ole Man leaned over the great oaken table and renewed, in a gentler key, the question as to whether Professor Child was justified in his construction of the Third Canto of the “Canterbury Tales.”  Under cover of the smoke I quietly disappeared with Mr. Cockerill, the Secretary, for a better view of the Kelmscott Press.

This was my first interview with William Morris.  By chance I met him again, some days after, at the shop of Emery Walker in Clifford Court, Strand.  I had been told on divers occasions by various persons that William Morris had no sympathy for American art 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.