Furthermore, my Milton is bound in black cloth, with stars and wreaths and baskets of flowers stamped in gold all over it. Furthermore, my Milton has all sorts of highly entertaining steel engravings, most delightfully 1857--Lycidas being shipwrecked on St. Michael’s Mount, and the Warring Angels mustering for battle, and skeletons and devils and angels and “wood nymphs, deck’d with daisies trim,” keeping “their merry wakes and pastimes,” and Melancholy, who looks like Queen Victoria in her old age, and the “Goddess fair and free, in heaven yclep’d Euphrosyne,” wearing a very becoming white frock. Furthermore, my Milton was “Presented to Mifs Ellen R. Baxter, by Her Resp’t’l friend, J. Stuart, Oswego, May 4, 1859”--so the violet ink inscription on the flyleaf tells me. And some one has drawn in pencil a very attractive cat on the blank page opposite the opening of “Samson Agonistes.” The efficient library’s copy of Milton lacks all these amiable associations. My efficient friend possesses a Byron, it is true. But not to be mentioned in the same breath with the volume which stands in my study between Witter Bynner and Bliss Carman. My Byron contains eight contemporary memoirs of the poet, by distinguished fellow-craftsmen, and sixteen pictures--himself, his birthplace, his Newfoundland dog, his daughter, and a dozen landscapes which the publisher happened to have on hand. Also, in the preface of my Byron I find this sentence: “Thus died Lord Byron at the early age of thirty-seven, leaving behind him a name second only to that of the renowned Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, and a memory which the sublime effusions of his muse will endear to all posterity.” My friend’s Byron has nothing to compare with this. The trouble with my friend’s library is that it has no surprises. Any one who has seen his waistcoat--the V of which is edged with heavy white cord--and his cuff links--which are oval and bear, engraven on their golden surfaces, his initials--could describe his library to a volume. It is obvious; its obviousness is a part of its efficiency. I suppose Benvenuto Cellini is on a shelf of the efficient library. He must be, since he is in the public library. Probably my efficient friend has also Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography” and the “Complete Works of Mrs. Humphry Ward.” He has a limp-leather tissue-paper encyclopedia, and an obese dictionary, and a magnificent atlas. And in a corner of his study he has a map of the world in the form of a great globe on a pivot. I envy him this last possession, for one may amuse himself by spinning a geographical globe, as one entertains himself by spinning a piano stool. But aside from this, there is nothing in my friend’s library that I desire. And my own triumphantly inefficient library--what treasures it contains!