the apparent enjoyment of peace and good-will.  “Slavery Doomed” and “Slavery Justified” composed one externally harmonious group, while “Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World,” “How I became a Unitarian,” and Strauss’ “Life of Jesus,” lay beside their rigidly orthodox neighbors, the “Following of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis, Cardinal Wiseman’s “Doctrines of the Church,” and a Jesuit Father’s idea of the Happiness of Heaven.

Uncle’s fondness for his country home was manifested by thirty or more large volumes upon Agriculture, and several others upon Rural Architecture, while his literary and aesthetic taste was displayed by a superb edition of Macaulay, in eight octavo volumes, combining the whitest of paper and the largest and clearest type, with richest binding; Lord Derby’s translation of the Iliad, Mackay’s “Thousand and One Gems,” a large and elegant volume of Byron’s complete works, and Bryant’s “Library of Poetry and Song”—­the two latter beautifully bound and illustrated.  Xenophon, Herodotus, Josephus, and Caesar lay off at an aristocratic distance from their neighbors, and looked down with scorn upon anything so modern as Noel’s “Rebellion,” or Draper’s “Civil War in America;” while memories of the buried “Brook Farm” arose from the past as mamma took up a volume or two upon Co-operative Associations.

Uncle’s strict temperance principles were illustrated by half a dozen volumes upon the “Effects of Alcohol,” including “Scriptural Testimony against Wine;” and a work or two upon the Tariff Question recalled many a Tribune editorial penned by the dear, dead hand.

A large dark pile of some twenty volumes loomed up from a distant corner—­Appleton’s useful Cyclopaedia—­and beside them lay an enormous Webster’s Dictionary, handsomely put up in a chocolate-colored library binding.

Many elegantly bound volumes were presentation copies from their authors—­among them a magnificent album of languages, beautifully illuminated, and bound in scarlet morocco, containing the Lord’s Prayer in one hundred different tongues.  This book sold, Ida said, for one hundred dollars a copy.

In striking contrast with this gorgeous volume were two little yellow-leaved, shabbily bound books, valued, however, at one hundred dollars each, and treasures which no money could have bought from uncle—­one a copy of Erasmus, dated Basle, 1528, and the other “The tvvoo Bookes of Francis Bacon on the Proficience and Aduancement of Learning, diuine and humane,” printed, the fly-leaf states, at London, in 1605.

July 3.