It is only when we come to look around us that we can discover how much we have lost. In one's lifetime a thousand little things are gathered and put away, and we find ourselves turning to them every now and then. Money cannot supply these. Many of them are endeared to us through association. Some are the gifts of friends who have since passed away, never to return, and others again came into our possession in various ways. We may supply, with a portion of our insurance money, a few books, copies of the ones which we have lost, but these will not be the same. They will not be our copies. We love to read our own books. No Suckling can be the same as the one we lost the other day. It was not a rich copy, but it was a whole-souled, generous old fashioned volume, full of the old Knights daintiest bits of melody. We used to love to linger over the little age-stained page, and recover lines we had lost. And dear old Shenstone, too, is gone. We can easily get another Shenstone, but it won't seem at all like the old copy. In our own books we know just where to find what we want, and new copies never seem the same. And then there are books we like to take up now and then, just to fill in the odd moments of our lives; books of engravings and the like, and volumes of _Punch_, and great volumes of cartoons of say forty and fifty years ago. These are all gone now and few can be replaced. What great inroads the fire has caused among our private libraries, what a wreck it has made of those precious books we all loved so dearly. And those pamphlets, too, upon which we placed so much value, and the thousand little odds and ends of literature which we so tenderly gathered year in and year out. And our scrap-books--great, good-natured fellows, with broad sides and liberal pages, ready to take in all sorts of matter. These are no more. And whole hosts of unbound magazines, which we had tied together, and expected every day to send off to the binders. These are ashes too. We hesitate before we turn over the books we rescued from the burning, lest we discover greater losses, and miss fairer treasures. How many sets of books have been destroyed, how many massive tomes have been withered by the heat, how many dainty books of poetry have been swept away!