A very wholesome theory that a man’s home is his castle and that the sanctuary of private life is one that must be respected has no application in America to a public man. The fact that few public men quarrel with the general idea upon this subject proves that it has its basis in sound judgment and honest desire for greater intimacy rather than in impertinent curiosity. In the case of Mr. Bryan he has never quarreled with this widely held theory. For ten years he has been in the glare of publicity. From the night, a decade ago, when he discomfited the champion of Republican politics in the opening debate of his first congressional campaign, a light has been constantly turned upon him and from him to his home life. That he has come out from under this strong scrutiny a more commanding figure, viewed either from the standpoint of the wise statesman or the typical head of an American family, is a statement that will meet with no attempt at refutation. [Illustration: THE BRYAN HOME] On the first day of October next Mr. Bryan will have been married sixteen years. The ceremony was the culmination of a courtship extending over a period of four years, a wooing that had its inspiration in the atmosphere of school life, and which was continued during the years when he was a diligent student of the law and a struggling young attorney with the unblighted courage and the indomitable energy that have come to be such marked characteristics of the man. They first met at a reception given in the parlors of the Presbyterian Academy at Jacksonville, Ill., to the young men of Illinois College. Mrs. Bryan, then Mary Baird, was a student at the Academy, and Mr. Bryan was in attendance at the College. There was little of romance attached to either their meeting or their courtship. Both were young, he twenty, she nineteen. Some sentimentalist has told that she was first attracted to him by hearing him recite some school book classics. The fact is that some friend pointed her out to Mr. Bryan as a girl he “ought to meet.” And mutual friends introduced them. Miss Baird was born at Perry, Ill., on the seventeenth day of June, 1861. Her father was a merchant, one of a firm that conducted a general store in that town. His employment gave Mr. Baird, naturally a studious man, much leisure, and this he improved by reading. His daughter inherited his taste for literature and it has abided with her. The invalidism of her mother prevented her from finishing the course she had begun at Monticello Seminary, at Godfrey, Ill., but later she was able to attend the academy at Jacksonville, from which she graduated with first honors of her class.