Helen was then taken to the beautiful alto-relievo of Bernini, representing the infants Christ and John playing together. It is a little thing, and slowly the child ran her eye-fingers over the chubby babes. Suddenly her sightless face lighted with the rarest smile. Her soul had understood the significance of the holy group by an intuition that science cannot gauge, and she bent over and kissed the sacred children. After all, every home exhibits a clinging pananthropoism, if one may be permitted to coin the word. Books and pictures and statuary are the man, just as much as his style. They are his most subtile expression. They are his unlying interpreters. As you walk into Doctor Hale's parlor, resting upon the floor, there confronts you a realistic colored photograph of the compelling Matterhorn. That picture, with its glacier, its precipices, and its summit, conquered only by cooeperative achievement, is a fit emblem of a family climbing from height to height. We left the table, and Lyman Beecher's splendid portrait, that formed a strong background for Doctor Hale's impressive head, and stopped for a moment in the boys' study, opposite the parlor. There is the portrait of Edward Everett, by Stuart Newton: of Alexander Everett, by Alexander, and of Mrs. Hale, by Ransom, and a striking picture of the doctor himself. How many of these sedate portraits have been shocked by shuttlecock and bumped by football at the hands of Doctor Hale's rollicking boys, only one of whom, Robert, of rising literary reputation, is left with his father in the home! [Illustration: RESIDENCE OF EDWARD EVERETT HALE.] Across the narrow back hall one takes a quick glimpse of the four phases of the moon on the stairway, then of hundreds of volumes lining the walls, billows of books, breaking upon one everywhere--five thousand of them. "That is Thomas Arnold's portrait--father of Matthew," said Doctor Hale, pointing from his sofa, and then settling back into reminiscences:--"Longfellow over there, and Dean Stanley. I liked Stanley, and I think Stanley liked me. We were on very cordial terms. He sat at the desk where you are, and I gave him Gladstone's article on America, published that fall. There was a carriage at the door. I was to show him some historical places. It was October, and cold. I told the boys to bring some rugs. They came to the carriage with a lot of Arab shawls. Stanley had just come from the desert, and with marvellous dexterity he wound a shawl about him so that he looked like an Arab sheik. I got a little frightened at the oriental look of it, and said: 'Oh, we shall be in all the newspapers.' With reluctance he consented to throw a cape over his shoulders instead. But I always regretted that I did not allow him to go through the streets as an Arab dean. When I bade him good-by that night, he said, with his wonted thoughtfulness, 'Let me pay for this carriage; you would never have had it if it hadn't been for me.'