He had a natural talent for drawing; in fact, in his younger days he dabbled in most of the arts. He discoursed to me at length on one occasion of musical instruments, about all of which he seemed to have much curious lore. He had been able to play more or less successfully upon the violin, the banjo, the guitar, and (his humor bubbling) the snare and bass drum! “There’s nothing,” he said, “so much fun as thumping a bass drum,” an instrument on which he had performed in the Greenfield band. “To throw your legs over the tail of a band wagon and thump away--there’s nothing like it!” As usual when the reminiscent mood was upon him, he broadened the field of the discussion to include strange characters he had known among rural musicians, and these were of endless variety. He had known a man who was passionately fond of the bass drum and who played solos upon it--“Sacred music”! Sometimes the neighbors would borrow the drum, and he pictured the man’s chagrin when after a hard day’s work he went home and found his favorite instrument gone. Riley acquired various mechanical devices for creating music and devoted himself to them with childish delight. In one of his gay moods he would instruct a visitor in the art of pumping his player-piano, and, having inserted a favorite “roll,” would dance about the room snapping his fingers in time to the music. II Riley’s reading was marked by the casualness that was part of his nature. He liked small books that fitted comfortably into the hand, and he brought to the mere opening of a volume and the cutting of leaves a deliberation eloquent of all respect for the contents. Always a man of surprises, in nothing was he more surprising than in the wide range of his reading. It was never safe to assume that he was unacquainted with some book which might appear to be foreign to his tastes. His literary judgments were sound, though his prejudices (always amusing and frequently unaccountable) occasionally led him astray. While his study of literature had followed the haphazard course inevitable in one so uninfluenced by formal schooling, it may fairly be said that he knew all that it was important for him to know of books. He was of those for whom life and letters are of one piece and inseparable. In a broad sense he was a humanist. What he missed in literature he acquired from life. Shakespeare he had absorbed early; Herrick, Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow were deep-planted in his memory. His excursions into history had been the slightest; biographies and essays interested him much more, and he was constantly on the lookout for new poets. No new volume of verse, no striking poem in a periodical escaped his watchful eye.