brings with it keen enjoyment and much lasting happiness. The transition from mere comfort to luxury brings incomparably less and costs incomparably more. Let a man of enormous wealth analyse his life from day to day and try to estimate what are the things or hours that have afforded him real and vivid pleasure. In many cases he will probably say that he has found it in his work--in others in the hour spent with his cigar, his newspaper, or his book, or in his game of cricket, or in the excitement of the hunting-field, or in his conversation with an old friend, or in hearing his daughters sing, or in welcoming his son on his return from school. Let him look round the splendid adornments of his home and ask how many of these things have ever given him a pleasure at all proportionate to their cost. Probably in many cases, if he deals honestly with himself, he would confess that his armchair and his bookshelves are almost the only exceptions. Steam, the printing press, the spread of education, and the great multiplication of public libraries, museums, picture galleries and exhibitions have brought the chief pleasures of life in a much larger degree than in any previous age within the reach of what are called the working classes, while in the conditions of modern life nearly all the great sources of real enjoyment that money can give are open to a man who possesses a competent but not extraordinary fortune and some leisure. Intellectual tastes he may gratify to the full. Books, at all events in the great centres of civilisation, are accessible far in excess of his powers of reading. The pleasures of the theatre, the pleasures of society, the pleasures of music in most of its forms, the pleasures of travel with all its variety of interests, and many of the pleasures of sport, are abundantly at his disposal. The possession of the highest works of art has no doubt become more and more a monopoly of the very rich, but picture galleries and exhibitions and the facilities of travel have diffused the knowledge and enjoyment of art over a vastly wider area than in the past. The power of reproducing works of art has been immensely increased and cheapened, and in one form at least the highest art has been brought within the reach of a man of very moderate means. Photography can reproduce a drawing with such absolute perfection that he may cover his walls with works of Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci that are indistinguishable from the originals. The standard of comfort in mere material things is now so high in well-to-do households that to a healthy nature the millionaire can add little to it. Perhaps among the pleasures of wealth that which has the strongest influence is a country place, especially when it brings with it old remembrances, and associations that appeal powerfully to the affections and the imagination. More than any other inanimate thing it throws its tendrils round the human heart and becomes the object of a deep and lasting affection.