gentlemanly-looking man, who might be taken for an author himself,
from his intellectual appearance and conversation. The library is
the largest of all the apartments--fifty feet by sixty. Nor is it
too large for the collection of books it contains, which numbers
about 20,000 volumes, many of them very rare and valuable. But the
soul-centre of the building to me was the _study_, opening into the
library. There is the small writing-table, and there is the plain
armchair in which he sat by it and worked out those creations of
fancy which have excited such interest through the world. That
square foot over against this chair, where his paper lay, is the
focus, the point of incidence and reflection, of thoughts that
pencilled outward, like sun-rays, until their illumination reached
the antipodes,--thoughts that brought a pleasant shining to the sun-
burnt face of the Australian shepherd as he watched his flock at
noon from under the shadow of a stunted tree; thoughts which made a
cheery fellowship at night for the Hudson Bay hunter, in his snow-
buried cabin on the Saskatchiwine. The books of this little inner
library were the body-guard of his genius, chosen to be nearest him
in the outsallyings of his imagination. Here is a little
conversational closet, with a window in it to let in the leaf-sifted
light and air--a small recess large enough for a couple of chairs or
so, which he called a "Speak-a-bit." Here is something so near his
personality that it almost startles you like a sudden apparition of
himself. It is a glass case containing the clothes he last wore on
earth,--the large-buttoned, blue coat, the plaid trousers, the
broad-brimmed hat, and heavy, thick-soled shoes which he had on when
he came in from his last walk to lay himself down and die.

On signing my name in the register, I was affected at a coincidence
which conveyed a tribute of respect to the memory of the great