To return to Mr. Hale. As for his library, it may be said that, like his own exterior, his thinking-shop is plain and little adorned. It is his nacre shell lined with the fair pearl of his thought. The room is just back of one of the large front drawing-rooms, and “gives” upon a little _cul-de-sac_ of a side-street. It is a small room, and is crammed with plain bookshelves and cases of drawers. In this room most of Mr. Hale’s writing is done. He has a good collection of books and maps relating to Spanish-American subjects. Among these is a _fac-simile_ of Cortez’s autograph map of Lower California, made for Mr. Hale by order of the Spanish Government from the original copy preserved in the national archives. Mr. Hale being, by his own frequent confessions, the most terribly be-bored man in the universe, and having always had a hankering after Sybaritic islands where map-peddlers, book agents, and pious beggars might never mark his flight to do him wrong, it seemed providential, in a twofold sense, that a wealthy friend in Roger Williams’s city, the writer of a work on the labor question, should have carried out the brilliant idea of building the hard-worked author a summer retreat in the soft sea-air of Rhode Island. For the dreary romance of the Newport region--its vast, warm, obliterating Gulf Stream fogs, and the crusty lichens that riot and wax fat in the moisty strength thereof, the warm tints of rock and sky, naiad caves and tangled wrack and shell, and reveries by fire of flotage wood--you must peep into Colonel Higginson’s “Oldport Days” or Mr. Hale’s “Christmas in Narragansett.” The latter book is full of charming description and autobiographical chit-chat. Manuntuck, where for twelve years the Hales have summered, is a little hamlet to the south of Newport and far down on the opposite side of the bay. It is six or eight miles from anywhere; it is almost at the jumping-off point; if the organizer of charities gets there, he will either have to walk or hire a team. The real southern limit of New England, according to Mr. Hale, is formed by a certain “long comb of little hills, of which the ends are gray stones separate from each other.” On a high ridge of these hills is Colonel Ingham’s cottage. In front of the house is the geological beach, about a mile and a half wide. In good weather Montauk Point--the end of Long Island--is visible, as is also Gay’s Head on Martha’s Vineyard. Just back of the house is a lovely lake, and further back are other lakes bordered by swamps filled with pink and white rhododendrons, and many plants interesting to botanists. It is the region dwelt in of old by the Narragansett Indians. The swamp where in 1675 the great battle was fought is not far away. The Indians called the region Pettaquamscut.