On the same floor is the library, a modest-sized room, made to seem smaller than it is through being compactly filled from floor to ceiling with a collection of three thousand books. The specialties chiefly observed in its composition are Americana and first editions. Aldrich would disclaim any very ambitious design, but there are volumes here which might tempt the cupidity of the most finished book-fancier, and of a kind that bring liberal sums in market. Something artistic in the form has generally guided the choice, as for instance Voltaire’s “La Pucelle,” and the “Contes Moraux” of Marmontel, containing all the quaint early plates. You take down from the shelves examples of Aldrich’s own works done into several languages. Here is his “Queen of Sheba” in Spanish, Valencia, 1879. Here is the treasure which perhaps he would hardly exchange against any other--the autograph letter of Hawthorne warmly praising his early poems,--saying, among other things, that some of them seem almost too delicate even to be breathed upon. Never did a young writer receive more intelligent and sympathetic recognition from a greater source. Among the curiosities of the shelves in yet another way is a gift copy of the early poems of Fitz-Greene Halleck to Catherine Sedgwick. On the title-page is found a patronizing line of memorandum from that minor celebrity in American letters, reading “Mr. Halleck, the author of this book, is a resident of New York.” Aldrich has never been subjected to the severe pecuniary straits which befall so many literary men. He has undergone in his time, however, sufficient pressure to acquaint him with that side of life at least as an experience, to give him a proper appreciation no doubt of his ample worldly comfort, and also to furnish the stimulus for the development of his early powers. He had prepared, in his native town of Portsmouth, to enter Harvard College, but, his father dying, he became a clerk instead in the commission house of a rich uncle in New York. He had his own way to make in the literary world; he began at the very foot of the ladder, with fugitive contributions, and by degrees identified himself with the newspapers and magazines of the day. He even saw something of Bohemian life, a knowledge of which is no undesirable element in one who is to be a man of the world. He dined at Pfaff’s, and was one of a coterie which circled around _The Saturday Press_ and the brilliant, erratic Henry D. Clapp. I recollect passing with him the office of this defunct journal in Frankfort Street, on the occasion when he had come to New York to be the recipient of a complimentary breakfast at Delmonico’s in honor of his induction into the editorship of _The Atlantic Monthly_. He looked with interest at the dingy quarters commemorating so very different a phase of his life, and repeated to me the valedictory address of the paper: “This paper is discontinued for want of funds, which, by a coincidence, is precisely