His library added its testimony as to other humanities. Scattered about on tables and mantel-piece were fine old pipes and boxes of cigars and playing-cards. There were poker chips, showing that the doctor had poker neighbors (where else if not there?), though whist was his game. You realized that he was a man at home among a people who loved play--must have play. On his sideboard were temperate decanters: he had sideboard neighbors. Altogether a human-looking room for much that is human; easy to enter, comfortable to stay in, hard to quit. But our closest friends can come so close to us and no closer; they surround us but none of them enters us. Nature forbids that any but our own feet should cross the bridge spanning the distance between other people and the fortress of the individual. Across that bridge we can take with us no companions except those that keep silent amid its silences; that can speak to us but that cannot see us: those great voices without eyes; those great listeners without ears; great counsellors without criticism; great hands that guide and refuse to smite; great judges that embody law and refuse to sit in judgment on us--Books. Some of the doctor's books held for him life's indispensable laughter; and no one of us ever tells all the things in this world that we laugh at. Some held for him life's tears; and no one of us ever tells the things that secretly start our own. Some held neither laughter nor tears but what is above both--life's calm; and what one of us but at times feels the need to ascend to some inner mountain-top of our own spirits--far above the whole darkened or radiant cloud-rack of emotion--and look futureward into the promised peace, the end of our wandering. Joys--sorrows--and calm: these three for him, too. Such books stayed with the doctor year after year. He could wake in the night and find them through the darkness; in the darkness they knew how to find him. They were not part of his medical library, of course, which was another matter. But they filled three sides of a large low revolving bookcase in the middle of the room beside his easy chair and his lamp and table.