when he visited Sagamore Hill.  There are things from European friends; a mosaic picture of Pope Leo XIII in his garden; a huge, very handsome edition of the Nibelungenlied; a striking miniature of John Hampden from Windsor Castle; editions of Dante, and the campaigns of “Eugenio von Savoy” (another of my heroes, a dead hero this time); a Viking cup; the state sword of a Uganda king; the gold box in which the “freedom of the city of London” was given me; a beautiful head of Abraham Lincoln given me by the French authorities after my speech at the Sorbonne; and many other things from sources as diverse as the Sultan of Turkey and the Dowager Empress of China.  Then there are things from home friends:  a Polar bear skin from Peary; a Sioux buffalo robe with, on it, painted by some long-dead Sioux artist, the picture story of Custer’s fight; a bronze portrait plaque of Joel Chandler Harris; the candlestick used in sealing the Treaty of Portsmouth, sent me by Captain Cameron Winslow; a shoe worn by Dan Patch when he paced a mile in 1:59, sent me by his owner.  There is a picture of a bull moose by Carl Rungius, which seems to me as spirited an animal painting as I have ever seen.  In the north room, with its tables and mantelpiece and desks and chests made of woods sent from the Philippines by army friends, or by other friends for other reasons; with its bison and wapiti heads; there are three paintings by Marcus Symonds—­“Where Light and Shadow Meet,” “The Porcelain Towers,” and “The Seats of the Mighty”; he is dead now, and he had scant recognition while he lived, yet surely he was a great imaginative artist, a wonderful colorist, and a man with a vision more wonderful still.  There is one of Lungren’s pictures of the Western plains; and a picture of the Grand Canyon; and one by a Scandinavian artist who could see the fierce picturesqueness of workaday Pittsburgh; and sketches of the White House by Sargent and by Hopkinson Smith.

The books are everywhere.  There are as many in the north room and in the parlor—­is drawing-room a more appropriate name than parlor?—­as in the library; the gun-room at the top of the house, which incidentally has the loveliest view of all, contains more books than any of the other rooms; and they are particularly delightful books to browse among, just because they have not much relevance to one another, this being one of the reasons why they are relegated to their present abode.  But the books have overflowed into all the other rooms too.

I could not name any principle upon which the books have been gathered.  Books are almost as individual as friends.  There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them.  Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover’s besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls “the mad pride of intellectuality,” taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.  Of course there are books which a man