a desire for a multitude of apartments with the fancied necessity that
compels some men to live where land costs five dollars the square foot.
The various members of Mr. Grey's household designated this room by
different names. The servants called it the library; Mrs. Grey and two
small people, the delight and torment of her life, papa's study; and
Grey himself spoke of it as his workshop, or his den. Against every
stretch of wall a bookcase rose from floor to ceiling, upon the shelves
of which the books stood closely packed in double ranks, the varied
colors of the rows in sight wooing the eye by their harmonious
arrangement. A pedestal in one corner supported a half-size copy of the
Venus of Milo, that masterpiece of sculpture; in its faultless amplitude
of form, its large life-giving loveliness, and its sweet dignity, the
embodiment of the highest type of womanhood. In another corner stood a
similar reduction of the Flying Mercury. Between the bookcases and over
the mantel-piece hung prints;--most noticeable among them, Steinla's
engraving of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, and Toschi's reproduction, in
lines, of the luminous majesty of Correggio's St. Peter and St. Paul;
and these were but specimens of the treasures inclosed in a huge
portfolio that stood where the light fell favorably upon it. Opposite
Grey's chair, when in its place, (it was then wheeled half round toward
his guest,) a portrait of Raphael and one of Beethoven flanked a copy
of the Avon bust of Shakespeare; and where the wallpaper peeped through
this thick array of works of literature and art, it showed a tint of
soft tea-green. In the middle of the room a large library-table groaned
beneath a mass of books and papers, some of them arranged in formal
order, others disarranged by present use into that irregular order which
seems chaotic to every eye but one, while for that one the displacement
of a single sheet would insure perplexity and loss of time. But neither
spreading table nor towering cases seemed to afford their owner room
enough to store his printed treasures. Books were everywhere. Below the