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.

So I go on wondering what education is, and nobody seems quite
willing to tell me. I bought some wall-paper once, and when it had
been hung there was so much laughter at my taste, or lack of it,
that, in my chagrin, I selected another pattern to cover up the
evidence of my ignorance. But that is expensive, and a schoolmaster
can ill afford such luxurious ignorance. People were unkind enough
to say that the bare wall would have been preferable to my first