My tawny Scotch terrier, Wye-I, always takes up his position on the purple plush cushion at one side of the fireplace, and the Maltese cat, Cattiva, on the crimson one opposite, by instinct, because most becoming severally to their complexions. The cat never catches mice. There are no mice in my castle for her to catch. The dog is much attached to her. He is considered remarkably intelligent. In gratitude for my forbearing to cut off his tail, he uses it as a brush, watches the coals, and, when they snap out, sweeps them up with it. He sometimes, with a natural sensibility which does him no discredit, accompanies the performance with the appropriate music which has earned him his name. My summer parlor is much larger. It is paved with little hexagonal tiles, green, purple, and white alternately, like a bed of cool violets, with a border of marine shells in mosaic. The walls are cloaked as greatly as the _Cloaca Maxima_, with verdant leaves, light and dark, through which, here and there, peeps a rock. There is no arsenic among them. The windows look seaward to see the ships come and go. Venetian blinds, of the kind that turn up and down, admit only green light at noon, softer or brighter according to my mood. Lace curtains sweep the floor with a slumberous sound when the sea breeze breathes in. Some of my visitors might say that this room was too empty. I should promptly disagree with them. To a person of correct taste, not to speak of a philanthropic bias, it must be painful to see, in warm weather, anything which calls up a vision of warm handmaidens, laborious with their brooms and dusters. Therefore I must persist in admitting here little furniture besides the oriental bamboo couches and porcelain barrels that flank the room, with little daisy-and-moss-like _chenille_ rugs beside them. One Canton tepoy holds my _aquarium_, and another, beside the most frequented of the lounges, the last number of the most weighty of North American periodicals. If ever I take a nap, it is here. In the centre of the room, a white-marble Egeria, carved by Thorwaldsen, throws up between her hands a shaft of cold crystal water, pure as truth, which spreads into a silvery veil all around her, and plashes down in a snowy basin: no place could be more inviting for a bath. But in the winter Egeria shows her power of adaptation by furnishing instead a Geyser of hot water. Then I turn my scientific friends in here, when they call upon me, to make them feel at home. In the position of Jack Horner, sits Miss Hosmer's Puck. Opposite is a mate production, which she never put on exhibition. It is Ariel, perched hiding in a honeysuckle, and leaning slyly out to play on an AEolian harp in a cottage latticed window. Over the somewhat frequented couch of which I have spoken, there is a picture by Paul Delaroche of