There is then in his make-up a curious balance of conservative tendencies and a due share of remonstrance and even of headlong radicalism. To a superb mental equipment is to be added a physical constitution strong enough to have pulled him through an infancy and childhood full of peril and no doubt of suffering, and to have landed him in manhood’s estate with a vivacious and courageous disposition, a master of his fate. He is also endowed with an almost superhuman capacity for work. It may be that, conscious of hidden frailties of tenure, the impulse is within him to burn his candle of life fiercely; but I am disposed the rather to think that in his case this use of energy is mainly a question of superior “horse power”--he is able to work more than most of us, and therefore he does. But great capacity does not always so express itself; and it would be unjust, unless one chose to regard Mr. Ford as precocious in youth and phenomenal at all times, not to recognize that the fate which distributes gifts to mortals gave him Opportunity. Free, if he so wished, to follow his own devices and to take the joys of life without undue exertion, he was wise enough, at an age when most youth sows an unprofitable crop on stony ground, to plant in the fertile furrows which a farseeing father had sedulously made ready for him. As for education and the discipline of school life, so wholesome for the most of us, there was for him literally none of it. His nursery, his primary school, and his college all may be found within the four walls of his father’s library. The books held within the quiet residence in Clark Street, Brooklyn, must now be nearer 100,000 than 50,000 in number. They fill all parts of the large house fashioned in the manner of fifty years ago, but their headquarters are in the library proper, a room at the rear, over fifty feet square, and reached from the main floor by a short flight of steps. This room is well but not glaringly lighted by a lantern at the top, while the sides, with the exception of a few small windows of no great utility owing to the tallness of surrounding buildings, are fully taken up with books to the height of eight feet. The floor is covered in part by large rugs; the walls and ceilings are of serious tint; a fireplace is opposite the entrance; while sofas of most dissimilar pattern and meant seemingly to hold any burden but a human one, are placed “disposedly” about; chairs, easy but not seductive, are in plenty, but like the sofas give notice that here is a government not of men but of books--here there is no library built for the lust of the flesh and pride of the eye, but for books and for those who use them. I cannot suppose that those smitten of bibliophily would thrill over the Ford library, since it exists for the practical and virile, although it is, in parts, exceedingly choice. Roughly classified to suit the easy memories of the owners, it presents an appearance urbane and unprecise