The exquisite quiet of this room! I have been sitting in utter idleness, watching the sky, viewing the shape of golden sunlight upon the carpet, which changes as the minutes pass, letting my eye wander from one framed print to another, and along the ranks of my beloved books.... I have my home at last. When I place a new volume on my shelves, I say: Stand there whilst I have eyes to see you; and a joyous tremor thrills me.... For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.... I regard the book with that peculiar affection which results from sacrifice ... in no drawing-room sense of the word. Dozens of my books were purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called the necessities of life. Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily need. At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamored for food, I have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so advantageous a price, that I could not let it go; yet to buy it meant pangs of famine. My Heyne's Tibullus was grasped at such a moment. It lay on the stall of the old book-shop in Goodge Street--a stall where now and then one found an excellent thing among quantities of rubbish. Sixpence was the price--sixpence! At that time I used to eat my mid-day meal (of course, my dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the real old coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found. Sixpence was all I had--yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a plate of meat and vegetables. But I did not dare to hope that the Tibullus would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell due me. I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my pocket, eyeing the stall, two appetites at combat within me. The book was bought and I went home with it, and as I made a dinner of bread and butter I gloated over the pages. New York Letter GEORGE SOULE Hilaire Belloc is coming to America next fall for a lecturing tour. It is well to take stock of him, so that we shall know what to expect. He is clever, and a Catholic--that tells the whole story. We don't know exactly how he will say it, but we know what he will say. Through various smiling subtleties and paradoxes he will attack democracy, feminism, socialism, individualistic rebellion of any kind. It is quite possible that he will aim a few careless shots at Montessori, the discussion of sex questions in public, Galsworthy, and Bernard Shaw. He is a masculine, English, Agnes Repplier. He will entertain his cultivated audiences, and give them the impression that he is very modern and daring.