To describe the home of a homeless man is not over easy. For the last sixteen or eighteen years Mr. Leland has been as great a wanderer as the gypsies of whom he loves to write. During this time he has pitched his tent, so to speak, in many parts of America and Europe and even of the East. He has gone from town to town and from country to country, staying here a month and there a year, and again in some places, as in London and Philadelphia, he has remained several years. But, as he himself graphically says, it is long since he has not had trunks in his bedroom. However, if to possess a house is to have a home, then Mr. Leland must not be said to be homeless. He owns a three-storied, white-and-green-shuttered, red-brick house with marble steps, of that conventional type which is so peculiarly a feature of Philadelphia--his native town. It is in Locust Street above Fifteenth--one of the eminently respectable and convenient neighborhoods for which Philadelphia is famous, with St. Mark’s Church near at hand and a public school not far off. But besides this respectability which Philadelphians in general hold so dear, Locust Street boasts of another advantage of far more importance to Mr. Leland in particular. Just here it is without the horse-car track which stretches from one end to the other of almost all Philadelphia streets, and hence it is a pleasant, quiet quarter for a literary man. Here Mr. Leland lived for just six months, surrounded by all sorts of quaint ornaments and oddities (though it was then years before the mania for bric-à-brac had set in), and by his books, these including numbers of rare and racy volumes from which he has borrowed so many of the quotations which give an Old World color and piquancy to his writings. It was while he was living in his Locust Street home that his health broke down. His illness was the result of long, almost uninterrupted newspaper work. He had worked on the _Bulletin_ and on New York and Boston papers, and he had edited _Vanity Fair_, _The Continental Monthly_, _Grahams Magazine_ and Forney’s _Press_. In addition to this regular work, he had found time to translate Heine, to write his “Sunshine in Thought,” his “Meister Karl’s Sketch-book,” and his “Breitmann Ballads,” which had made him known throughout the English-speaking world as one of the first living English humorists. But now he was obliged to give up all literary employments, and, having inherited an independent fortune from his father, he was able to shut up his house and go on a pleasure-trip to Europe, where he began the wanderings which have not yet ceased.