MY FATHER
rooms, beneath roofs on which a sun blazed with such intense fury during the day that the dews of night never cooled them, or in winter fording the Brandywine and Red Clay Creeks on horseback, through snow and ice, through hail and blinding sleet and rushing winds, he rode to save a woman's life.
And then the scene changes to long streets of bricks and mortar and white marble steps, at that time relieved by rows of maple-trees, whose pretty leaves cast their flickering shadows on the hot brick sidewalks and streets paved in cobble-stones. Here, in the old Quaker City, he began, so far as his limited resources would permit, to collect books and engravings, to gratify his taste for music and the theatre, and to frequent the exhibitions of pictures, chiefly of the Barbizon School, for there were then, in the city, several patrons of modern Art. Daubigny was one of his great favourites, and side by side were examples of Corot, Diaz, Jean François Millet, Boldini, and Alfred Stevens.
But, as I have said, books became his great hobby, and his library grew, from day to day, to the alarm of my mother, who, in the end, had to care for the thousands for which there were no shelves or cases, and find places to stow them away under the beds and chairs, or packed in high columns two or three deep, against the walls of the unoccupied rooms. I can remember one room, where I have sometimes slept, having a path only from the door to the bed, between walls of musty volumes—a disposition of books that reminds me of John G. Johnson's method of disposing of his surplus masterpieces of ancient Art in closets, bathrooms, and under the beds of his house in South Broad Street.
These books were not rare first editions or in tooled
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